3. THE COTTAGE GARDEN

When I first designed the Cottage Garden, back in 1992, I intended it to be a square lawn bounded by pleached limes and hornbeam hedges. It never happened. A local farmer came with his plough, and as the soil was exposed I saw that it was the most wonderful, rich loam. This, I thought, was wasted on a lawn. So that area became our vegetable garden and this is how it remained for the next 20 years.

Over the years it became increasingly formal, with clipped box hedges replacing the original wovenhazel fencing around 24 beds and eight large Irish yews – originally planted in the Jewel Garden and moved in a wheelbarrow by my wife Sarah and me in 2008 – adding structure. It was architectural and ornate, and more potager than allotment. In 2013, it began the transition to a cottage garden, where flowers, fruit and vegetables traditionally grew side by side in a lovely carefree jumble.

Cottage gardens evolved around the homes of the rural poor, living in tied cottages with a scrap of land where they could supplement their incomes by growing vegetables. Occasionally a flower was allowed to enter into the mix. However, what has filtered down into popular gardening culture is something much softer, a loose, informal style of gardening that has become identified with rural charm, innocence and a sense of harmonious abandon.

Cottage gardens were never planned or designed. You plant according to the dictates of surrounding plants and your own intuition. You can mix shrubs, flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables in an entirely unstructured way. This takes quite a lot of confidence, but the results are both truly modern and much more like oldfashioned cottage gardening. It is also absolutely in line with modern organic theory.

Our Cottage Garden is still evolving, but the big change came when I began to replace vegetables with roses. I planted more than 40 different varieties and, for a glorious few weeks in June, they dominate the garden.