Cottage gardens

click photo to enlarge

If I lived in a cottage I'd have a cottage garden. Perhaps that sounds self-evident, but it isn't because a "cottage garden" these days means a particular type of planting and presentation rather than any just any old garden that happens to be attached to a cottage. The other day, as we walked through the village of Castle Rising in Norfolk, we passed the pair of cottages in today's photograph and, impressed by the front gardens, I took this shot.

The planting exemplifies much that I like about the cottage garden. On the right is a golden privet with a few white flowers showing. This shrub often forms an evergreen (actually "ever-yellow") hedge in older gardens but here it was a bush that in summer was offering its vivid colour and in winter would do the same, but give structure and height too. It was poking over a length of stone, brick and tile wall.The remainder of the flowers are typical cottage garden perennials, intermixed to an extent, giving a variety of colours at different heights. There are white-petalled marguerites with their yellow centres hanging over the picket fence, pink mallows, glossy skimmia with its red berries, aquilegia, lillies, orange roses, three kinds of clematis, tall hollyhocks - the quintessential cottage garden flower - and much more. Set against the brick and stone walls, with the white ornate porch, the dormers and the pantiles above, the planting makes for a picture of a typically English rural cottage.

I used the 17-40mm lens at its widest setting for this photograph and had to over come my natural inclination to step back and produce a more architectural image with "correct" verticals.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Box hedges and cottage gardens

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The English cottage garden is a thing of beauty. It features a large variety of traditional flowers planted in beds and borders, against walls and next to fences and hedges: varieties such as hollyhocks, delphinium, rudbeckia, geranium, dianthus, euphorbia, yarrow and rambling roses. Tall species at the back of the border peep over lower plants at the front. Paths of brick, stone, gravel and grass meander through the garden, past the lawns, greenhouse, cold-frames and vegetable plot. Apple and plum trees, together with gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes provide the fruit for pies, bottling and jam. The appearance of this kind of garden is one of control being imposed on gentle disorder.

However, there is a regular addition to the cottage garden that sometimes seems at odds with the overall feel of this kind of planting, and that is the formal box hedge. It has its origins, I suppose, in the disciplined parterres and symmetry of the formal gardens of the sixteenth century, but how and why it found its way into the cottage garden is a mystery to me. Its straight, closely clipped lines and sharp shadows contrast strongly with the riotous drifts of pastel flowers and the anarchic growth of climbing roses. Perhaps that is the point of it in this context - to lend a little formality to the pleasing patchwork and to demonstrate that the gardener can and does exercise control, even though, in some areas it may not look like it!

Today's photograph was taken at Barnsdale Gardens in Rutland, and features in their cottage garden, one of thirty seven small garden layouts that inspire the many visitors who go there each year.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On