The Cottage Garden Flowers That Actually Thrive Not Just Look Pretty

The best cottage garden plants are pretty, they flower for a long time, some of them are fragrant, they're wildlife friendly and above all they grow well in your climate and soil. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and I've picked out 25 of the best cottage garden plants from gardens I've visited. You can color scheme a cottage garden like Tim Pilgrim has in this contemporary cottage garden or you can make it a riot of color, a patchwork of flowers, either is fine. There are no real rules in cottage gardens. So what is a cottage garden? The idea was that cottagers would grow plants that they could grow cheaply and easily, so they might for instance have taken cuttings from friends or got seeds from a nearby garden and the plants were mainly not just pretty but useful. You might make soaps out of them, you might use cottage garden plants medicinally, you eat a wide range of them and of course flowers just simply to cheer one up and to provide food for pollinators. Native plants is a good thing if you're thinking of a cottage garden because native plants will always give your wildlife the best possible chance, however in many parts of the world you don't have to stick to native plants because we have unexpected weather patterns and we may have an unexpectedly early warm spring or perhaps a very late warm autumn and so the pollinators will be out there, our native plants have stopped flowering and non-native plants, provided they're not invasive, are a very useful source of nectar and pollen. So it's not a one-size-fits-all situation but certainly start with native plants for a cottage garden. So I'm going to start with asters, now renamed in some cases Symphyotrichum. You can get asters or plants that look like asters all around the world. They are native to the prairies of North America and Canada, there are asters that are native to Europe and also to Asia, so you can find one wherever you are and they come in beautiful pinks and blues and whites. They're great for late season color and interest. Perhaps the most classic cottage garden climber has to be the honeysuckle and of course it's got a beautiful fragrance and it's very wildlife friendly but honeysuckles do come with a bit of a warning. Once again there are honeysuckles native to North America, there are honeysuckles native to Asia and there are ones native to Northern Europe, but some of them, the Asian ones for example, can be very invasive in North America so you do have to check what kind of a honeysuckle you're planting before you plant it. The other thing with honeysuckles is that some of them are very vigorous and they will grow and grow and grow, so unless you want to spend a lot of time clipping them back and back and back, just check what the final size will be. One of the classic cottage garden flowers is poppies. Now annual poppies grow from seed and the seed can survive really very cold winters, but obviously they'll need the weather to warm up before it germinates. An annual is a plant that grows from seed, flowers and dies in one year and of course the common poppy or Papava roas is one of those. Now it's typically found where you've had the soil disturbed, for example when I dug up my border after 15 years of leaving it, pretty much as no dig, the following summer I got loads of poppies and of course that's why it stands for the First World War, because poppies appeared in the fields after the First World War because they'd been dug up by tanks and trenches. Poppies are really wildlife friendly, I've often found two bees in one of my poppies, so they're a wonderful choice and they come in scarlet but also some sort of pretty purples and lilacs, so it's worth having a little look at the different varieties. Another cottage garden classic is catmint or Nepeta and really obviously the only reason not to have catmint is that it could attract cats into your garden, however it's drought resistant, it's deer resistant, it's slug and snail resistant, it grows really easily, flowers for a long time, really it's just probably the easiest plant in the world to grow and it comes in white and lilac and blue. Quite often people recommend growing catmint or Nepeta rather than lavender because it's a very similar effect and it's a much more resilient plant, although it has to be said that actually lavender is a pretty easy grow plant as well, but it just doesn't like getting its feet wet. Another really easy grow, drought resistant, slug resistant, deer resistant plant is the globe thistle or Echinops and I've got two clumps in my garden and quite frankly they're indestructible and the bees absolutely love them and they give a sort of sculptural interest and a nice gray foliage to the border. Once established globe thistles need hardly any care, their seed heads will be eaten by the birds and over the winter it'll all gradually collapse and then you can clear it away and new foliage would pop up from the base in the spring. Another plant that no cottage garden will be without is hardy geranium. Now people mustn't get confused between hardy geraniums and pelargoniums. Pelargoniums are usually labeled geraniums in garden centers but they're very tender, they really won't last a winter outside unless you're in a very hot climate and they're usually in pots, they're very Mediterranean, but hardy geraniums can tolerate some really cold areas and there is a huge number of them, there's about 500 different varieties and some of them like my Anne Thompson or Anne Folkard sort of spread and their flowers kind of roam all through your border and other ones are lovely low growing ground cover and there's even hardy geraniums for dry shade, so what more can you ask? Hardy geraniums flower for months and literally the only care they ever need is to be chopped back once a year and quite often they'll even bring out another set of flowers after that. So far all the plants I've mentioned have been really easy care and low maintenance but some cottage garden plants are really pretty, really fragrant but they do need quite a lot of work. You will see people say for example that sweet peas are easy to grow. Looking after sweet peas isn't difficult but you do pretty much have to be attending to them every day. They can get eaten by slugs, you constantly have to deadhead them to keep the flowers going, you'll need to train them up, you'll need to support them and actually I've got very few photographs of sweet peas and that's because so few of the gardens I visited have got them in them, which I think says something. Another plant that needs a little bit of extra care, although it does produce some wonderful gorgeous spikes of color, is the lupine. Some lupines are hardy and will live over winter but most of them are treated as annuals and like all annuals you'll need to plant them in spring, you'll need to protect them from slugs and snails, you'll possibly need to support them and then you'll need to deadhead them and clear them away when they're over. Both lupines and those other gorgeous spikes of cottage garden flowers, delphiniums, are a little bit harder work. I mean they're so worth it but just don't think that they'll be low maintenance. And in terms of bulbs I would say tulips are higher maintenance than others, partly because tulips don't come back year after year as well as other bulbs do. When I interviewed Neil Miller of Hevel Castle about tulips, he said that actually you get your best flowers from tulips the year after you plant them and even if they do come back they won't be as good. If you look at my garden you will see that there are lots of different kinds of tulips dotted in ones and twos around the garden and that's because I've chosen a lovely group of tulips, I've planted them in a clump, they've come up, they've looked gorgeous and the next year one of those has come back, so I've planted another clump of tulips a bit nearby. So what you can see is the remains of lots of clumps of tulips over the years and it I think it looks quite pretty and it's quite cottage gardening but it's not really the effect I was going for. So what are the best cottage garden bulbs? Well it has to be said that daffodils are so easy care, there are thousands of different varieties, there'll definitely be one near you, they're very very cold hardy and of course they provide nectar and pollen in the early months when quite a lot of daffodils spread. You can grow daffodils in the lawn for a very charming cottage garden effect, just remember that you can't mow the lawn until six weeks after the flowers have died back. I find it fine actually because you just mow the lawn six weeks later and then the lawn's fine but I'm not a lawn perfectionist. Alliums have these lovely pom-pom blooms which are so sculptural and they're very easy to grow and once again quite a few of them self-seed and spread. I think I bought 15 Allium purple sensation about 15 years ago and I think I counted over a hundred in my garden one year, so it's almost a question of just having to dig them up and throw them away if they spread too much. Of course that is a bit of a problem with plants that spread very easily, you say well will I be overrun? On the whole I think it's easier to pull plants out than it is to plant them and it's certainly cheaper, so it's just a question really of keeping an eye on it and deer, rabbits, squirrels and foals don't apparently like the taste of Allium, it's part of the onion family, so taking that almost no plant can be completely guaranteed to be deer resistant, it's probably a good one if you want a cottage garden and you've got a deer problem. Alstroemerias are another very pretty flower and although they used to be mainly grown for the florists industry, they're being grown in gardens now quite a lot. I've got a video on how to grow alstroemerias with alstroemeria grower Ben Cross which I'll put in the description below, but they are very easy to grow. The only thing you have to remember about alstroemerias is that you can't cut them, you have to pull them like rhubarb, you pull the stem out, if you cut them that affects how they will go on to flower later. So what are the best cottage garden shrubs? Well shrubs of course are always very easy care and I would put lavender quite high on the list of best garden shrubs. It won't grow if you have very damp soggy soil but otherwise it's pretty hardy and by lavender I mean English lavender. I had great clumps of English lavender which I planted about 12 or 13 years ago, maybe 14 years ago, and it just went on and on and on and the bees adored it. We'd see lots of different kinds of bee and butterfly in the flowers and then when the the sparrows would eat the seeds and then we'd cut it back into neat shapes which looked good in frost over winter. Then there are roses. Now roses are the classic cottage garden shrub and roses can be high maintenance, it slightly depends what you want to do with them. If you want perfect roses with no black spot then you are going to have to work quite hard on it, but if you're prepared to grow roses in amongst lots of other plants and apparently growing salvias for example can help with black spot, then all roses really need is to be given extra fertilizer at the beginning of the year and in the middle of the year. They are very hungry plants but otherwise many of them are very wildlife friendly. The very sort of elaborate double blooms are never as good for pollinators as single blooms are. Roses mostly have a gorgeous scent and what would a cottage garden be without roses? Another plant that gives you months and months of interest is hydrangeas. They're a plant that's sort of been forgotten about I think over the years. There's lots of different kinds of hydrangeas, some are native to the North America, some are native to Europe, some are native to Asia and you'll find a hydrangea for you. Not all of them are wildlife friendly, the mop head ones are not because they don't actually properly have pollen or nectar, but the other ones are and the thing about hydrangeas is that the flowers come out usually either mid or late summer and then they stay and they slowly go brown and they become sculptural and very often they're still flowers like dried flowers in winter and they look fabulous in frost, so that's six months of interest and hydrangeas are very easy to look after, you just have to prune them once a year and I've got a video about how to prune hydrangeas easily in the description below. So cottage garden perennials, well perennials are low maintenance because they live in your garden for three years or more and very often all you really have to do to them, apart from sometimes deadhead them to have more flowers, is to dig them up about every three or four years if they've grown into a great big clump. You divide the clump and then you replant it which gives you plants for free. Monada or bee balm is another really easy care plant, it doesn't like very wet or boggy conditions but otherwise it's pretty resilient and it's deer resilient which is great. It's not particularly slug resistant, you may get some slug attacks but usually it won't stop you growing the flowers. Verbena bonariensis has to be the perennial, a quite short-lived perennial that any cottage garden would love. It's loved by pollinators, the birds love the seed heads and the seed heads still look good in winter, so it's another very long season of interest and also because it's got very long stalks and you can see through it to the plants behind, so although it's a tall plant it actually doesn't leave your border looking too crowded or blocking other plants. And I think if there's one plant that I have seen in garden after garden after garden and that is sedum, now known as hylotelephium or stone crop. Sedum autumn joy and sedum matrona are two absolute classics, once again adored by pollinators, they're quite low growing, they're best for the front of the border but they really do flower for quite a long time and they're quite tough. I mean I planted one of these in the wrong place about 12 years ago and it was just too shady and it never really grew but it didn't die and when I dug it up and moved it into the sunshine it became a fabulous flower. Hylotelephium can get nibbled by slugs, it's got that sort of thick fleshy stems and leaves that one of mine was nibbled by a slug and a whole little branch broke off and I put it in a vase and when I suddenly remembered it was there about three months later, I saw that the stem had grown little roots so I simply bunged it in the soil and it's perfectly happy making another plant and really you can't ask more resilient or easy grow than that. I think every cottage garden needs some annuals and biennials and as annuals are plants that grow from seed, flower and die in one year, biennials do it in two and probably the most famous cottage garden biennial is a foxglove and foxgloves have these great spires of flowers, they are once again adored by bees. They're very sort of easy going, I find that foxgloves really go where they want to in my garden, they self-seed not too vigorously. I have tried sort of planting them in particular places but they seem to say well no we're going to make up our own minds about where we want to grow so I pretty much let the foxgloves do what they like. If you cut the first big spire off after it's finished flowering, you'll get a sort of spray of smaller flowers so it can give you interest for quite a long period of time. Foxgloves are very poisonous so if you have small children that are likely to try and eat your plants or puppies that try and chew your plants, then don't grow foxgloves. Hollyhocks, another classic cottage garden plant can be annuals or biennials and I think a bit like foxgloves, I've had people say that they've tried to plant hollyhocks in one part of the garden and it's been moderately successful and then a fabulous hollyhock has sprung up in another part of the garden, but they have got that gorgeous kind of floral cottage garden feel to them. Another plant that is really good for quite a long period of time is cleome. Now you can get cleomes in violet, pink or white and they're quite tall plants but you don't really have to deadhead them because they just keep getting taller and taller over the summer. Filling a gap with a clump of cleome really actually will always look good and once again very pollinator friendly and of course you have to think about cosmos. Cosmos is a lovely simple flower and there are now some lovely new varieties, there's lemon cosmos, there's frilly cosmos. Cosmos are very easy to grow from seed, they're very unfussy, they do like a sunny spot or at least one with partial sun and they're just so pretty and if you keep deadheading them, they will go on and on and on until the first frosts. I actually looked at a cottage garden in Australia which the head gardener Bill Bampton at the Diggers Club said was a cottage garden mash-up, so he was mixing native plants with typical cottage garden plants to create that same informal, loose, colorful cottage garden look. And one plant that I reckon you could have in any cottage garden whether you're in a warm climate or a cool climate and that's salvia. They're very long flowering, in the cooler climates we would struggle and I struggle to keep my salvias over winter, but obviously if you're in a warmer climate that will be fine, but salvias are so colorful and so long flowering it is really worth having a look at them. And so what about trees for a cottage garden? Well you must have a tree, I mean you could grow a climber up it, maybe a honeysuckle, maybe a clematis, but cottage gardens have trees and of course above all they have fruit trees or you could have a nut tree or a native tree. I can't think of anything better than having a crabapple tree because there's fabulous flowers in the spring and then you've got the little fruits which actually you have to make into crabapple jelly, you can't eat them yourself and the birds absolutely love them. Or you could try perhaps a fruit tree which is perhaps not very well known, something like a quince or a medlar or even a mulberry or something like that, a fruit tree that perhaps isn't being grown commercially very widely and then you can keep it going in your garden. So if you want to know more about what cottage garden style actually involves, then don't miss this video on what is cottage garden style and how to achieve it here and thank you for watching, goodbye!