THE COTTAGE GARDEN

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Later these styles were largely supplanted by the landscape movement, with its park-like sweeping lawns, winding paths, natural-looking lakes, and far perspectives. Yet perhaps even more significant than changing styles was the influx of thousands of new plants from all over the world.

Meanwhile, the cottage garden persevered, unaffected by the nobility's fads. As fashions changed and the new exotics took over the estates, many of the wild flowers survived only in these humble home settings. The cottagers did acquire a taste for some imports: the American currant, tulips from Turkey, jasmine from Persia, fuchsias from South America, chrysanthemums from Japan, and bear's-breeches, rosemary, and love-in-a-mist from the Mediterranean. But their gardens remained primarily reserves for older, simpler, species plants.

Modern Adaptations

The romance of raising "antique" flowers may be enough to catch your fancy, but there's much to be learned from cottage gardens. Many modern growers have limited space but wide interests-flowers, fruits, vegetables, culinary and medicinal herbs, and butterfly- and bird-attracting plants. Why not imitate the old cottagers and grow them all together?

Like their predecessors, contemporary mixed gardens will show much individual variation. Some gardeners may choose to beautify a vegetable plot by loosening up its style and including flowers; others may admit a few of the prettier vegetables and herbs into an ornamental display; still others may go for a mixture of perennials, annuals, and ornamental and fruiting shrubs.

Contemporary design books often call for precisely planning a garden or border-down to the exact number of plants. But each cottage garden develops over time. It isn't laid out in strict patterns like the old formal estate gardens. Instead, it has a more spontaneous evolution that lets you plant what you have, as you can. Rather than submitting to an overall, symmetrical design, it contains pleasant groupings: a favorite color combination here, a group of everlastings with their strawy-textured flowers there, and for fall color, Michaelmas daisies flanking a scarlet-leaved blueberry. The most beautiful composition may be totally unplanned-a last rose of summer drooping over the silver foliage of cottage pinks.

This informal approach is well suited to gardeners who grow their own seedlings. Purchased perennial flowers tend to be rather expensive, and the variety available in most nurseries is often limited. You can grow what you want inexpensively from seed-but keep in mind that your level of success will vary. If I get 34 columbine, six pasqueflower, and 50 bellflower seedlings from my starting efforts, that's just what I'll plant.

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