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Cottage Garden Redux
| Article
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19326 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
1,140 Words |
| Author
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Virginia Greiner
Virginia Greiner writes a weekly gardening column for the
Washington Times. |
Forget proper English gardens, with their clipped hedges and formal beds. Forget geometric foundation plantings, careful color schemes, and manicured lawns. Stop worrying your garden to death. The newest trend in garden design is an old favorite--the relaxed, easy-going cottage garden of fond memory.
Most of us have one of these cozy beauties in our mental scrap-books--a place where old-fashioned cosmos, hollyhock, black-eyed Susan, and sweet William were all jammed in together, spilling over the edges of a gravel path or a brick walk. Herbs and vegetables were tucked in around the flowers helter-skelter, never lined up in a row. There was probably a small fruit tree, giving a little shade and attracting birds and bees. Every inch of space was teeming with life.
And of course there was a friendly stone wall or a picket fence to provide privacy, even in the front yard. And a bench to sit on and drink in all the sights and smells of a drowsy summer afternoon.
Often we associate these comfortable and unassuming gardens with our grandmothers. As Richardson Wright wrote in 1924, "[She] was always in her garden--she worked in it, and she sat in it, and she enjoyed it. ... Perhaps it was because we always found her there that we have such pleasant memories of grandmother's garden."
Now grandmother's kind of garden is back in style again. But with some differences.
A Little History
Cottage gardens were the rule for many generations in Europe, where they provided food, medicine, and beauty on a very personal scale. When the early colonists came to America, they often started similar gardens, out of homesickness and necessity.
America's early cottage gardens showed tremendous diversity, ranging from stucco court-yard entrances for Spanish settlers in Florida and California to secure little plots in New England, enclosed by handbuilt fieldstone walls or neat picket fences.
But cottage gardens had fallen out of favor by the early part of this century, one reason for this being the fixation Victorians had with formal planting designs. These gardeners concentrated on carpet bedding schemes where thousands of plants were laid out in intricate patterns. Gaudy
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