With a Cottage Garden, you bring back the cozy English charm of past centuries. With their abundance of flowers, Cottage Gardens are a delight for both the viewer and the owner, who can enjoy a rich harvest in summer and autumn.

For the Cottage Garden was always also the vegetable garden of the common folk. And anyone who knows the graceful beauty of cabbage or the stunning purple flowers of an eggplant knows how much they can enhance a lush garden.

Even if you haven’t yet ventured into growing roses, you should definitely give them a try in your Cottage Garden, as it’s not as difficult as it may seem to help these lovely beauties thrive. With a strong pruning in the autumn, you can rejuvenate roses and enjoy their blossoms year after year. In the Cottage Garden, roses are often planted as espalier at the entrance, or used as hedges or islands.

The typical English Cottage Garden often also housed a beehive, where its residents would not only pollinate the fruit blossoms but also wander from flower to flower in this lush sea of blooms, later gifting the cottage’s inhabitants with their sweet offering.

The classic Cottage Garden is primarily a practical garden that provides fruits, vegetables, and herbs, but it is distinguished by the fact that every available space is filled with the most beautiful flowers. There are essentially no rules; beauty is in what pleases.

Typically, you'll find Clematis, Delphiniums, Foxgloves, Evening Primrose, Irises, Poppies, Dahlias, Lupines, Marigolds, Violets, Daisies, Forget-Me-Nots, and all flowering herbs in a Cottage Garden. Additionally, all bulbous plants like kitchen onions, garlic, tulips, and more, as well as ornamental garlic, Lady's Mantle, and Columbine.

The cottage, a simple hut usually built from natural stones or bricks, around which the Cottage Garden was laid out, gave the garden style its name. Of course, not everyone has access to such a cottage, but you can bring the charm of these country houses into your garden with a few tricks, as coziness is key.

For example, you can create a lovely accent by combining pretty walls made of bricks or natural stones with lush, climbing, and sprawling plants. This gives the space a wild, romantic look, just like the English fairy tales of elves and fairies. Leave gaps and crevices in the wall so that typical small flora like moss and lichens can settle, adding the necessary patina to the whole scene.

When decorating your Cottage Garden, what you need most is a good sense for beautiful flowers. Since many of the native and thus uncomplicated species are annuals or biennials, you can vary the design wonderfully and never get tired of it.

You can create additional accents with edging, trellises, and decorative elements made from natural materials such as wooden fences, willow branches, boxwood, and hedges. The key principle for the Cottage Garden is "lush," one of its core slogans.

The paths in your Cottage Garden can be simply filled with pebbles or designed more elaborately with bricks. A popular, though labor-intensive, option is also laying bricks in a herringbone pattern.