Front Yard Extreme Makeover: 4 Years to a Cottage Garden

When I bought my house, it looked like the perfect setting for a horror movie. And while it had the facade only a father could love, I knew that with some creative design and a lot of elbow grease, I could transform it from an archetypical haunted house to a cottage garden straight out of a fairy tale. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not really a syrupy sweet optimist perfectly living out of a Thomas Kinkade landscape. I even had a committee of vultures who come visit the garden. I think that joke made a lot more sense in Portuguese. Yeah, a group of vulture is really called a committee, and they felt so at home one season they deliberated and decided to raise their young in a little dilapidated shed in the back. I like to think they bring balance to the scene. That's all to say that I like to embrace a bit of chaos, and I'm quite aware of the negative sides of gardening. I wanted my front yard to be a profusion of colored shapes, much like an impressionist painting. I'm pretty confident I can achieve that vision. It shouldn't take too long, right? I've been gardening for two decades now, so how hard could it be to transform this space from the ground up? This space started with just lawn, lots of weeds, a broken up sidewalk, a falling apart porch, some brambly bushes, a couple isolated daffodils, and a red Japanese maple tree I have a love-hate relationship with. But I had a problem. Where to begin? Oh, this is gonna take years. And this is when it dawned on him that home improvement is a journey punctuated by ups and downs, where the downs are especially painful and the ups are quickly normalized. However, as he looks one day and realizes the house he raised has grown into a respectable home, all the struggle seems to dissipate and only humbling pride remains. They do grow up so fast. If only the garden could grow itself. But alas, unlike a home, a garden is a wild, temperamental changeling. If I wanted my garden to become an inspiring space, I would have to put in the work. I mean, I'm okay with hard work. Hard work is good work. Two years top and I'll be enjoying the fruit of my labor. In the first years, I built up my signature protected raised beds and reconfigured the concrete slabs into a charming curved path. I even planted flowers around the porch, including lilies, peonies, gladioli, in the hope of achieving a loose, flowered, filled cottage border. It all looked wonderful on paper, but by the end of the first year, well, let's just say it was a shadow of its potential. Like a shadow in a picture that was photocopied 20 times. Alright, it didn't go quite as planned. But there's still next year, so what could I do to ensure less of a failure next year? I knew it. I had to divide and conquer. I had to partition the space into a smaller room in order to overfill it with plants to achieve the look. Okay, it's a new year, it's a new plan of attack. I just gotta pack in the plants, fill up this garden room, and everything will work itself out. But there was a proverbial elephant in that room. A red elephant I have a love-hate relationship with. This tree here is a beautiful tree. However, it is casting too much shadow. Sometimes you have to make a few hard choices. This Japanese maple served as a general mass separating the house from the street. And while its color is just a match made in heaven for the house, I can't tell you the amount of times I wished it gone since it was hogging a lot of the sun and the best spot of the garden. But for now, since it is a beautiful tree and since it helps somewhat screen the house, it's gonna stay. So pruning it was the next best thing. But then I had a rude awakening. So I did encounter a huge problem there. I felt a drop hitting my head and that's when I realized the maple syrups weep profusely in early spring. So I had to wait for another year just to do this. I mean, what is time but the executioner of humanity? Then I pruned it in December instead of February and it worked okay. I ended up taking off about a third of the volume. It's a start but you know what? Arborists, look away please. Okay, one more year but with more available sunshine, I should be able to achieve a dense and colorful center display and that will anchor the front yard. Now, I could increase the flower border area in the heart of the garden but before I did that, I have to use the space I already opened by planting a plethora of perennial annuals and biannual seedlings in the already prepared beds in the hopes that some of them would stick. Amongst them was the holy grail for the cottage garden, the almighty holy hawk or hollyhock. It had grown in the previous year and it even started flowering but right when the hollyhocks are showing the most promise, I see that there are groundhogs around the area and if it weren't for the groundhogs, well, then it got diseased. It got a lot of rust and just like that, the hollyhocks were just a mirage. But since they're so iconic, I would not give up just yet. After repeated failures trying to grow a hollyhock and having them only succumb to rust, I chose the fig leaf variety and the Russian variety. Varieties that are supposed to be more disease resistant. If you've been watching my gardening journey for years, you may remember how elusive these majestic plants have been for me. It doesn't help that it takes two years for them to bloom either. The funny thing is that in the right spot and climate, these plants act like weeds, so some of you out there may be laughing at my struggle. I see you. Since I couldn't bank on finicky flowers, I made sure to include dependable species to fill up the border. I got some liatris. They might not be as tall as a hollyhock, but they'll do. So I'll plant them in different spots, some in a bit more shade and some in a bit more sun. That way I'll know exactly which spots it reacts best to. I just needed some kind of a plant that would fulfill the very important columnar form for a cottage garden. If you want to learn more about how I structure a cottage border, you can watch my cottage garden plant selection masterclass episode where I break down the different plant forms I seek for a cottage garden. Adding different kinds of daisies is a thing that I'm doing this year because I want to repeat the form, and that's one thing to create harmony, is to repeat the same flower form throughout the garden. As my goal was to fill the volume of this border, I added fennel, which acts almost like a weed. It surely would stand on its own and help soften the overall mass with its wispy growth habit. My next perennial of choice was peonies. They can be a bit of a prima donna though. To organize the space, I want to create sort of an alley, not really because it's short, but more of an axis that's flowery and would create a good rhythm for the garden. I was hopeful that this was the perfect site for them to develop well, but as I said, they're kind of finicky. They do take their time. You know, we gardeners are fooled sometimes for believing the sweet little promises sussurrated by persnickety flora. Alas, we can't really help it, can we? Has the bum buzzard slightly kept watch over my hopes and dreams? I fastidiously moved forward with my plans. See? A bit of planning and a bit of trial and error, and everything's going smoothly. And since now I know better, I gotta make sure to put up a fence first thing to protect my plants. Adding a fence would not only protect my garden from groundhogs and deer, it would also define the limits of the garden room so it could feel more intimate. Okay, so this is the point where a typical or practical person would just visit the hardware store and pick out a fence from one of the available choices in the catalog. Simple, right? But do I look typical or practical to you? No, I had to reinvent the wheel. If I could successfully create a t-joint by coiling galvanized wire to join the couplings and make it solid by plastering epoxy around it, I would then be able to build fence panels out of cheap and durable electrical conduit. And sure enough, it worked like a charm. It does look jerry-rigged and it's not the most beautiful thing. This should be strong enough for what I need and it's still cheap enough for me to produce several panels without spending a fortune. Now, you may ask, isn't there something like this for sale already in the marketplace? And the answer is yes, but it costs the eye off of your face, as we say in Brazil. I wanted to create these connectors for cents instead of dollars. So why did I choose to make my fence panels out of galvanized electrical conduit? It's simple. This material is not only lightweight and easy to cut with a simple pipe cutter, it is also very malleable for metal and can be bent with a simple pipe bender. I wanted to incorporate curves into my design so the fence would gain a more sophisticated aesthetic without breaking the bank. The galvanized pipe is also very resistant out in the garden. I know this from personal experience as I have used this material for plant supports for more than a decade and it holds extremely well. And the best thing about this design is that you can simply screw the pipe into these joints and it holds. Obviously, by themselves these joints are not super strong, but after some tinkering around, I solved the issue by adding additional bent support pipes, bracing the design, and curved pieces reinforcing the corners. One additional detail that sealed the deal for me was hammering the cut ends flat. It really elevates the design and to attach these brace pieces, I simply tied them up with galvanized wire using needle nose pliers. My goal was to replicate a traditional iron fence for cheap and without having to weld. Finally, I also secured some galvanized fencing mesh by weaving wire around the supports and voila, the panel was complete. I actually prefer the look of horizontal mesh like this instead of the diagonal chain link fence since chain link fence is just too heavily associated with industry, prisons, and school grounds. Sort of in that order. Awesome, now that I figured out the fence, I'm not gonna stop at just that. I'm gonna go fancy. This spot here is perfect to create an arbor. It will support the raspberries that I planted some time ago, but it also creates sort of a focal point, a nice structure that's a little bit light in terms of visual weight, but will not compete with the rest of the architecture. Since I first imagined the space, I envisioned an arbor or pergola marking the entrance. Before I even consider making these metal panels out of conduit, I had drawn up plans that called for wooden structures and thicket fences. While without a doubt this would be a setup, there was something I wanted to avoid. I didn't want the fence and pergola stealing the spotlight from the porch's architecture. I bought this house partially because of the quaint porch design, and to impose a visually heavy fence in front of it felt heavy-handed to me. After I built my ornate protected garden beds, I could physically experience how much attention they called to themselves, and while I think they fit perfectly to the side of the house, complementing it well, I knew that heavy structures obstructing the front facade would just not be ideal. With that in mind, I went about measuring and crafting the top of the pergola, and I could sense that someone was watching me. It is important to keep measurements as precise as possible, since metal has very little give. I carefully bent the pipe to the correct angles and fastened the pieces together with galvanized wire, making those connections as tight as possible. The structure consisted of two triangular sides, connected by straight lines with hammered edges, and stabilized by rounded pieces with hammered edges. While the initial inspiration for these was to replicate iron fencing, because of their construction and joining technique, they gained a bit of a rattan or bamboo furniture look, reminiscent of the chinoiserie style of the 19th century. With the overall frame of the top part built, now it's time to just make it a little bit more rigid, because since it's not welded, it has a lot of give. A bit of mesh will not only make it more rigid, but it will also give support for the After being hypnotized by the bouncing mesh roll, I laid it over the structure and stitched it to the frame by looping wire around the edges. This addition made the whole piece much more solid. Obviously, it still had a bit of give and flexion, not absolute sturdiness as compared to welded metalwork, but this would end up being a positive aspect to this design in the next steps, when I would create side panels to hold the overall structure. The bit of flexibility would make installation much easier. To create the side panels, I measured and cut segments of pipe that would form a floating rectangle on stilts. I used the hobbled together t-joints as the main form of attaching the pieces to create the desired geometry. The small curved corner pieces once again doubled as support and decoration. Tighter square wire mesh was installed over the main rectangle of the piece in the same way as in the roof, resulting in a pleasant rhythm to the eye. I fit the pieces together to finally see the whole structure for the first time, and the best thing about all of this was how lightweight this construction was. I was quite pleased with the results, except for one thing, the galvanized metal color. It was just giving early 2000s hip restaurant decor. So, I had to resort to one of my least favorite DIY materials, the dreaded spray can. I huddled together the pieces over a plastic tarp, donned my activated charcoal respirator to shield my poor asthmatic lungs from the gnarly effects of volatile organic compounds, and went about covering metal pipe and enamel. I wanted this arbor and fence to feel aged in the garden, not brand new, so to replicate the look of rust, I got another can of spray in the terracotta color. Maybe you're watching this and thinking, oh that's nice and gnarly, that structure there. It's just a shame having to go to all that trouble to build it, and is it really sturdy? You might as well invest in wrought iron structures and save your time. But you know what? I think there's a secret to this design that will win you over. It's sturdy enough, but it's not a permanent fence, and that's a good thing because you can move it around to reconfigure your space if you so desire. That's because to install it, all you need is some rebar pieces that elegantly fit inside the electrical conduit. You simply hammer the rebar directly into the soil on both ends, and slip the fence down. Quite satisfying. After measuring where the bars would go, I just drove them at least one foot into the soil, and started to assemble the pieces. If I ever get tired of the way the space is laid out, I can easily take everything apart. No concrete, no level, no nothing. This is the ultimate renter-friendly solution. The possibilities are truly endless. Okay, I sound like a fence salesman from a 1980s infomercial. But the reason why I'm patting myself on the back for this one is due to the past trauma dealing with groundhogs. Long-time channel watchers may remember the ugly, albeit quite effective cages I hobbled together in my old garden to protect plants groundhogs just love to eat. My current decorative protected beds are a vastly improved design that functions as a truly impenetrable fortress. But not to toot my own horn, this is a quantum leap. With this, I can create movable labyrinths in the garden that the king of minas would be jealous, and they will confuse the groundhogs who are quite persistent animals, but they're not very bright. Above all, I loved how light the structure turned out. It clearly was not competing with the facade, and would barely cast any shade onto the plants. Whoa, this pergola design is already elevating the space. It's a huge win. Now that I had a defined perimeter of this main garden room, I could remove the rest of the lawn to create the long-awaited large mixed ornamental bed. This would be the inner sanctum of the cottage garden. In fact, I would say having a large planting bed is one of the defining features of a cottage garden. Determined to have this area planted as soon as possible, I was not about to let a spring shower dampen my plans. In all seriousness, I knew this was only a passing cloud. It was mid-spring already, so I couldn't wait too long to get things planted. Soon, it would just be too late for the season. Time to pick up the pace there, buddy. Summer will not wait on anyone. I needed to put in plants that could have great immediate impact. I had two garden workhorses come to my rescue, dahlias and gladioli. Dahlias produce bushy masses with showy bulbs that bloom from summer into the first frost, and gladioli reliably puts out tall, pollinator, and highly showy flower stalks the same year it's planted. Running against the clock, I scramble to plug annual plant starts, including different kinds of daisies, climbing black-eyed susans, annual phlox, and wispy baby's breath, into any available nook and cranny. To guarantee a look packed with color and texture, every year I make sure to raise a plethora of annual cottage flower seedlings that are usually ready to hit the ground after the main flush of tulips and other spring bulbs. But before I continue planting this flower bed, I had something in my mind that I needed to figure out. You see, when I first imagined a new meadow pergola, I envisioned decorative finials embellishing the spiky points, and to keep true to my resourceful nature, I wanted to use recycled materials to fashion one. And sure enough, after noticing the hidden potential in a large tin can, I grabbed tin shears and started to snip the metal to craft a crowning jewel to the garden. I marked out 12 snips around the circumference and cut repeating lance shapes within two inches of the bottom of the can. Then I started to sculpt a crown-like finial by winding up every other flat-tipped petal into a volute, reminiscent of the shapes in the ends of a violin or an Ionic Greek column. I punched a hole in the bottom and opened up a socket that would fit around the points of the pergola. I punched two holes on the remaining flat-tipped petals and gathered them into a central cone, stitching them in place with wire. This immediately formed the crown shape I was looking for. Lastly, I only had to spray the crown with the same dark brown with a bit of the In the future, I could further decorate the fence, as time permitted, but for now, I had to focus on elevating the plants around this gate. So far, the royalty of the garden, the finicky peonies, were sluggish at putting up a show. Two years after planting them, and I only had one bloom buddy. The entire garden, in fact, was a long way from what I envisioned, and the new bare area stood out like a sore thumb. I still have high hopes for this year. I've been trying for three years, and even though it's still too early to tell, I feel my pessimism is waning at the moment. Maybe the vultures are to blame. Then it rained. Yet, all that rain caused summer blooms to start emerging. That lone peony unfurled its petals as a glorious royal garb. Some dianthus exploded specks of pink and magenta all over the garden. At the same time, the yellow salsify flowers surprised with their elegant but informal blossoms. I had originally planted them for the roots, but then learned that I should use them for the reliable late spring blooms. But there was still a missing piece to make the design of this garden room sink. While the central pergola had been a great match, I needed to connect the central portion of the front garden with the lateral potager in path. I had to emphasize this main axis from the side garden and parallel it to the main axis of the front garden. The best way to do this was to mirror the pergola, creating a stronger portal into a distinguished place. Well, this had actually been one of my first design choices in this space when I planted a kiwi vine where I felt the pergola should go. I am still debating if I'll keep this kiwi vine. The fruit never sets. In an ideal world, I would have a beautiful romantic climbing rose instead, but I don't know if there's any good knockout series climbing roses that would not develop disease here in Maryland to be worth the trouble. I don't trust roses here except for knockout series. While I waited for the cottage borders to reach peak growth for the season, I continued to cram in any open ground new plantlets. I certainly needed more ground-hugging sprawler plants beyond sweet alyssum to align the path, so I added several feverfew plantlets I had raised from seed earlier in the year. Soon, other signs of growth emerged, raising my hopes that this year's display could surpass last year's timid attempt. I've planted heliatras and it seems like it will do well here. Other plants like this type of daisy and fennel, they've been struggling with the shade of the other ones, so the garden is not as filled up as I would like, and even the scabiosa looks a little sparse at the moment, but if I fertilize well and keep watering, perhaps they'll do what they can. I did plant more hollyhocks. I don't know why I do this, since they're more the aspirational plant in this garden. On the other hand, foxgloves seem to be performing well. It's the early stages. I'm not sure if they're going to flower this year, since they are biannuals generally, but we'll have to wait and see. Indeed, I waited, and oh did I see it! The vibrant arrival of lilies inaugurated the colorful summer show. Lilies were proving to be quite dependable. In my case, I found lilies to be rather easy to grow because I don't see any major diseases or insects attacking them. There is such a thing as a lily beetle, they're red little beetles that can be a huge problem in certain areas, but it doesn't seem like it's a concern where I live, at least for now. Yet in other color-filled displays, I could see room for improvement. Color-wise, the carnation display is not pulling any punches. They are here to show, but I am missing a bit of some structure in the background. Perhaps some darker bush or something with a different value structure would just make them pop even more, or a progression of their blooms. To be fair, this small display was but a promissory note of the full effect I was striving to achieve. It is quite easy to design a garden of bountiful blooms on paper. It's a complete other thing to make it a reality, constrained by the physical and biological limitations of plants. One of the issues I've dealt with specifically in this bed is getting plants in the lower story to really fill up, and I want obviously colorful flowering plants, and they want full sun, but then you have the taller lilies take all the energy for themselves, and even though they're majestic, their feet start to show, and I want something that creeps underneath and flowers, so I have to start thinking of options. I was experimenting with a few sprawler plants, including this magenta-flowered succulent. It did provide punchy color that hugged the ground, but it needed lots of sun to bloom reliably, and the cool magenta color was not what I was looking for. While I had planted several types of annual plants, not all of them had developed to the same degree. Some, like the agaristema, had been able to fight for their space and grow large enough amongst the taller perennials to make an impact. Agaristema needs to be planted early on in the season, as it is a cool-loving plant, but when it blooms in late spring, its large blossoms perched upon wiry frames dance in the wind and help activate the space, bringing whimsy to the garden bed. At this stage, this cottage bed showed a vast improvement when compared to how it looked in the previous year, yet I knew that by pinpointing its flaws, I could better plan for an even more glorious future display. Yeah, I gotta say, patience is key. Small victories, they tend to accumulate. With the arrival of July, new plants started to display their potential. Bright cosmos cheerfully formed clouds of color hovering over the main plantings, accompanied by equally joyful coreopsis. Delicately colored light salmon scabiosa blooms joined hands with sweet alyssum with a faint purple haze in creamy yellow button-like fever field to carpet niches and corners low to the ground, creating the soft and delicate edges that I see as a defining characteristic of cottage gardens. In fact, I felt that these corners looked like diminutive cottage gardens themselves, and really, that's a goal to achieve. Purple larkspur provided tall spires of color that perfectly complemented the bright orange cosmos. Even the usually scandalous colored gladioli echoed the muted tones here as they tumbled upon their own weight, and the whole space slowly took on the magical look of an English countryside scene. While I was pleased with the ethereal textures, I felt I needed a bit more of a solid structure to ground this fence and the diaphanous garden it enclosed. Weirdly enough, I chose to use the least dependable plant so far to accomplish this task, the finicky peony, but this time it was a bit different. Since I'm trying to increase my plant collection and at the same time save some money, I'm doing my best to do it from cuttings or bulbs or things of the sort, but I'm also looking out for good deals like clearances. I found these Ito peonies for a quarter of their price. It was precisely because of the foliage that I decided on them. I was looking for some kind of a repeating bushy mass to anchor the pergolas, and these Ito peonies, they do have sturdier leaves and they can function as leafy bushes that emerge in spring but stay green until fall. The fact that they also produce the most beautifully colored blooms once a year, that's an extra benefit. A few days later, and the garden adorned itself with the most glorious starburst of white. The large white lilies I had planted two years prior had reached their peak bloom, and as such completely transformed the scene, becoming the focal point of the garden. When I first planted them, they had grown to a modest height in the first year, and I thought there was something wrong with the labeling. They're very short. I was expecting for some reason taller lilies. Perhaps I didn't read the package directions right, or maybe they stunted in growth, but I don't think that's the case. They have all the flowers here, so I'm not quite pleased with this variety in this space. If it had really tall stems and these large lilies, I think it would be more in scale. At this point, it doesn't quite match. I'm glad I didn't pull them out then and there, because I've learned that lilies need a couple of seasons to reach their full potential if they're placed in a correct spot. I had echoes of white flowers around the garden to help bring unity to the scheme once these main actors dominated the stage. This looks like the painting from Sargent actually. Had I been victorious in reaching my goal? Had my dream cottage garden materialized before my own eyes? It did take three years for Airspad to get to the point that it has gotten, but you know what? It's worth it. Indeed, the garden was finally doing justice to the facade of the home. The once scary and dilapidated horror film setting had transformed into a magical wonderland. The excessively large lily blossoms contributed to the fantastical aesthetic, yet as I looked over the space, I just knew I had not yet reached its potential. There were still too many empty spaces and disconnected plant groupings. I knew it could go further. It could achieve a higher peak. As July gave way to the heat and humidity of August, the garden had some brighter and hotter reds, but overall it started to go downhill. By September, many of the early plants had withered in the summer heat, even as other plants like dahlias grew wildly, giving the garden a less organized, more jungle-like appearance. Notably, the fennel surpassed neighboring plants that had previously shaded it, growing tall and blooming into a natural botanical screen, and this inspired me to push forward and plan for an even more abundant garden in the coming year. I had not reached my goal yet. With this more gauzy effect the fennel had unlocked, and with more aspects of color dotting the entire scene, I planned to get to my goal. This is the fourth year. Fourth time's the charm. I gotta be prepared, so I'm going to frantically experiment with new ways of raising seedlings so I have lots of them and I can maximize my chances. I'm always looking for easy ways of starting seeds, and perennials can be a little bit tough because sometimes they want a little bit of cold. That's why winter sowing is just the right method to use to start perennials, and all you need really is a recycled container like this water jug. I found these containers to be especially effective, but people have been using all kinds of containers to do this. With the two parts, now you have a base where you can put the soil and a top that acts like a greenhouse, and it will just fit on top of it. You just fill it with soil and then you spread the seeds. It really couldn't be simpler. I was skeptical when I first saw this idea, but the promise of easily germinating perennials hooked me in. I was afraid that too much sunlight could cook the seeds, so I placed the containers where they would get morning sunlight and afternoon shade. The theory is that it creates a perfectly moist microclimate that hastens seed germination outdoors. The good thing is that I basically neglected these, and I only checked it every week or so to make sure the soil was moist but never waterlogged. After a few weeks, I didn't see any progress, so I thought the experiment was a fail, but sure enough, by February, all of a sudden, several seeds germinated. By March, they were screaming to be transplanted. I must tell you that not all seeds work with this method. Heat-loving zinnias, for instance, hate it, but I found that perennials, biannuals, and frost-hardy annuals, they thrived. The seedlings were growing so densely packed that not only I transplanted them into pots so that they would grow more before being planted out, I also decided to directly transplant tiny seedling clumps directly on their final spots. It was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of results, but my goal was to overfill these beds with lots of different plants to finally achieve the lush effect of a dense cottage garden. I had successfully raised poppies, dianthus, calendula, bachelor button, sweet alyssum, feverfew, ignatia, rudbeckia, and many others using this method. In case you never gardened before, you may think that all plants, they react the same when planted, that all you got to do is just throw the seed in the ground, water it, and watch it grow. But once you garden for a while, you understand that some plants are way more sensitive and can resent being directed and prodded and poked. They may do well by themselves, but hate being messed around with. Poppies are such an example. Poppies sometimes are a bit tricky to get going because they prefer to grow in place, so when we start them like this in containers, they may resent a bit of the transplanting. But at the same time, doing it this way, you have beautiful well-formed plants that are ready to go in, won't succumb to the damage of specialty slugs and perhaps other animals. That's why I try several growing methods and plant redundantly. If this year I wanted my garden to bloom abundantly, I would have to diversify my tactics. After loading up the center of my cottage border with an abundance of plant starts and while I waited for them to grow, I turned my eyes to the edges. I wanted to establish neat borders around this bed and especially along the main path axis I envisioned. It would keep the grass from encroaching on the beds and would make the space more neat and defined. Store-bought edging is an affordable and long-lasting solution, but I never liked how it looks, so I knew I had to do it myself. I think one of the greatest flaws of store-bought concrete edging is that it's all the same color, besides obviously the form, which is not very inspiring. But if you mix it your own, you can create variations of tone and that makes all the difference. It makes it look like terracotta or some other natural stone product. I much prefer the look of this rope style victorian edging, but how exactly did I get them? Well, I found the mold when I was browsing a local antique store. To make the pieces, I simply brush petroleum jelly over the mold as a release agent. I screw together the two parts and then I proceed to get the concrete mix ready for pouring. I use the rapid setting store-bought bagged concrete mix and add just enough water to achieve a workable consistency without becoming soupy. To color the mix, I use a bit of powdered oxide pigment such as red iron oxide, yellow ochre, or burnt umber, and by varying the amounts, I get several shades of terracotta. Here's a little tip, if you source these pigments from a ceramic supply store, it will be way cheaper than buying the ones you find in the home improvement store. To help get some air bubbles out, I vibrate the mold with an orbital sander or I simply tap the mold on a table several times. I allow the mix to set for at least four hours, depending on temperature, and once it is hard enough, I carefully unmold it and I put it inside of a plastic bag to fully cure for at least a week. Then it will be ready to install outdoors. While I found my mold at an antique store, you may be able to find a similar one online. To me, the most successful gardens are able to establish borders and break them. It is this push and pull between defined and loose that establishes the rhythm in the garden. By installing this edging on this path, I was first establishing a hard edge to mark the path that would also have a bit of elegance to it. Of course, adding soft plants cascading over this hard edge was my next step, so I picked and chose among many ground-hugging seedlings I had raised and went about planting them along my newly demarcated path. I planted a mix of annual plants that would give instant effect, such as calendula and sweet alyssum, some biannual plants like dianthus that should shine the coming year, and some reliable short perennials like feverfield that tend to regrow year after year. A layer of fresh mulch would neaten up the bed, preventing weeds from emerging and preserving moisture in the soil. And so, by late spring, I could already sense that despite all the previous failures and less than glorious results, the garden was about to gift me with my dream vision. Each day as I ventured out in the garden, I was surprised by new sights. The foxgloves that I had planted the previous year put out abundant, show-stopping spires of blooms in the most perfect shade of warm pink to golden yellow. It felt like the garden had entered into the realm where bedtime stories are created. Wait, I'm getting a good feeling about this. Don't wake me up just yet. The kingly peonies, though still few in number, arrived with an air of grace, directing all attention to themselves. Not all of them bloomed, but the ones that did gave me hope for a more flower-filled future. The majestic yellow ito peonies I had planted beyond the fence bloomed sparsely this year after being disturbed, but judging from the vigorous foliage, I knew that they would fare much better in subsequent years. Poppies in shades from white to pink to red popped up around the other plantlets that now grew in fury as the summer solstice approached. Calendulas were equally eager to display their early blooms to advertise nectar to buzzing bees. Some dianthus also exploded into color flecks around the border even though many of them did not return from last year's garish display. They don't always survive the winters. Even as the established plants sought to fill up the whole space with living color, I kept on planting extra seedlings in remaining bald spots. But some plants took advantage of the open space. The fennel quickly sought to establish dominance over the other plants, weaving up a densely filigreed screen of bright green and bronze leaves. I love this new development, but I knew I had to keep it in check as to allow other plants to grow amongst it, so I carefully pruned its higher branches. And sure enough, once the brightly colored Asiatic lilies bloomed, they did so behind a delicate veil of fennel leaves. This gave the garden a much more mysterious and magical mood. It had taken some time, but the garden had finally reached its peak. Over the large cottage border, flowers of all types contributed dots of color to the composition. Slowly but surely, the tapestry of blooms was closing up any exposed ground. Bachelor buttons bloomed along calendulous poppies and dianthus of several types. Nicotiana put out wiry stems decked with pendulous and bright blossoms. And of course, the reliable salsify flowers returned in fury to brighten the garden bed further in the background. Into my disbelief, as if declaring that I had finally graduated into a proper cottage garden after years of trial and error, the elusive and majestic hollyhocks had graced me with spires of blooms. It had been a storied saga of battling hungry groundhogs and other pestilence. Not only had the tougher yellow Russian hollyhocks lived up to their promise of disease resistance, but I had two pink ones healthfully displaying their showy blossoms. It was as if the garden had finally agreed to sing together in harmony, as if it finally recognized the tune I had longed to hear. The vision was solidifying, and as it did more and more, walking through the garden felt less and less mundane. Dreamtime had taken over the space with every petal that unfurled. All I had to do was remove the fading actors, deadheading old blooms to encourage more buds. When the white lilies bloomed again, this time amongst the partial veil of fennel, the garden felt more mature. It felt cohesive and complete. Only now, after amending the soil, after letting plants thrive according to the spot that they really like, with trial and error, I was able to raise a garden that can now be called a proper cottage garden. And it takes patience, but that's the thing that gardens know how to precisely work in us the most. It's a school of patience. It's a school of being able to observe each day's small changes, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and learn from them. One day you wake up and you just have paradise at your doorstep. Even though this felt like an ending, like I had arrived somewhere, I knew the place I had arrived was in fact a beginning. It was a homecoming. It was arriving at a home I had only in my dreams. I would start to get to know it better. I would be able to change around the furnishings and it would evolve and change from year to year. Yet, I knew that soon these flowers for this year would start to fade and winter would wither away all the beauty, but even that would be temporary. New cycles would start and I would also be able to expand the dream into the wider garden and really build paradise. Yep, it was all worth it. By the way, I want to start giving proper names for each garden room, so if you have any good suggestions of what this front part should be called, leave them down below. I would love to hear them. Wait, what about this shed? Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I do have several videos in the pipeline that I want to get out soon, so if you want to help the channel by buying art, you can check out my Etsy shop and I do plan to add more artworks in the weeks as I have a bit more available time. Thank you so much and see you next time.