Rather than gazing out at my sad, drought-hit garden, I’ve been dreaming about how it could look with a new book on cottage gardens. Beauty and Abundance is the perfect escape from the nightmare of gardening through successive heatwaves with a tour of some of the prettiest plots in the country.
(Sent review copy. Not paid.)
Our guide for this journey is Clare Foggett, current editor of The English Garden magazine, and the book is akin to a particularly sumptuous edition of the mag, full of stunning photography by Jonathan Buckley and words that give an insight into the creation of these gardens rather than just a recounting of what’s there.
It starts with an examination of what we mean by cottage garden planting, something that has fallen in and out of fashion over the years.
Clare’s opinion is that it’s not so much a rigidly defined style as “a celebration of beauty and abundance in many different forms”. Nor do the gardens have to be set around a cottage as it is more a way of growing rather than location that determines the label.
Gardens that fall into this genre embrace self-seeders, have borders filled with a glorious mix of colour, and prioritise plants over paving or lawns. They are also naturally places that welcome wildlife and have, as Clare says, “a ‘waste not, want not’ ethos”.
“. . . cottage gardens may be ‘old-fashioned’ but they are perfectly in tune with gardening today.”
The gardens we encounter in Beauty and Abundance are diverse. Some, such as Great Dixter with its “bountiful yet regulated informality”, are well known. Others, including Clover Cottage where every piece of fence or wall is cloaked in climbers, are not national names.
We learn of the ‘divided’ garden of Fiona and Martin Phillips where one grows flowers and the other fruit and veg. There’s the home patch of designer Matthew Childs, which he calls a ‘contemporary cottage garden’, and a couple of gardens local to me about which I have written: garden writer Val Bourne’s Cold Aston plot and artist Matthew Rice’s garden at Ham Court.
Of course, no book on cottage gardens would be complete without East Lambrook Manor, home of Margery Fish who did so much to revive the fortunes of the cottage garden style. It’s recently been bought by Alison and Andrew Johnson who are now tackling this Grade 1 listed plot and breathing new life into it.
It seems, as Clare says, that “As long as there are gardeners who love growing plants and whose mantra is ‘the more the merrier’, there will be cottage gardens.”
And when it comes to armchair dreaming, Beauty and Abundance is the perfect guide.
Beauty and Abundance by Clare Foggett with photos by Jonathan Buckley is published by Quadrille with an RRP of £35. #Ad You can buy it here for £26.10. (If you buy via this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.) Alternatively, you may wish to buy from an independent bookseller here. All prices correct at time of publication of this post.
Top image: Rustling End in Hertfordshire.
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