Happy New Year to you all! I don’t know about you but I feel recharged and ready to crack on in the garden. Which is just as well, as there’s plenty to do. A cottage garden may look like a wonderfully wild and loose thing. And to a degree it is. But don’t be fooled. It’s not an easy, low maintenance option. To keep it looking good you still need to edit, monitor and plan. To show you what I mean I thought I’d share some of my cottage garden plans – and problems for 2022.
Sunny Border
My sunny border which wraps around my patio is a classic mix of cottage garden plants. Lots of perennials – plants which come back year after year such as salvias, geraniums, gypsophila, nepeta, sedum, phlox and liatris spicata – all crammed together. These jostle alongside four roses, a cistus and a stipa (Mexican feather grass). I planted up the border about four years ago and it is lovely. But it is slightly running out of steam in places. So my cottage garden plans for this year include putting some oomph back into the border.
Dividing some of the plants will help. I divided up the sedum after it had finished flowering in the Autumn. But I didn’t get to the phlox, (Phlox Paniculata Mount Fuji) so I will divide them in the Spring.
I think may also need to divide the salvias (Salvia Nemorosa Caradonna); their flowers this year weren’t quite as good as usual. I’ve written before about how to divide perennials. So if you’ve got dividing on your ‘to do’ list you may want to check it out.
For four years I have tried to grow a coral coloured oriental poppy in the border. But last year only achieved one bloom. I can see that this year I have three poppy plants which look healthy. I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that they perform this year but am watching closely. If I still only get one bloom again I will give up on this idea! It will be time to try something else in the spot.
Cottage Garden Plans – Mulching
To further pep up the sunny border I’m going to give it a jolly good mulch. But this year as part of my cottage garden plans I’m going to go beyond this and mulch the whole garden! Not something I usually do. This is quite an undertaking as you need to put down a decent two inch layer. (It’s apparently better to mulch half your borders to this depth, than to put one inch of mulch on the lot.)
Mulch is so good for the garden. It gives a nutritional boost to your plants and it stops your beds drying out in the Summer. Mulch also inhibits weeds (hurrah) and insultates the roots of plants. If you want a garden which looks abundant – like its firing on all cylinders – then you need to take care of your soil by mulching.
You can use a number of things as mulch – bark chippings, leaf mould, well-rotted farmyard manure, even crushed shells. You can see how to create leaf mould here.
Normally I do the bulk of my mulching in March. That’s when I do most of my cutting back too. However, I gave my fully shaded border a mulch using year-old leaf mould in the Autumn. The idea was to protect some of the bed’s tender plants from the rigours of Winter. But if I’m honest I mainly did it for two other reasons. Firstly, I wanted to free up the bags the leaf mould was in as I needed somewhere to store this year’s leaves. Secondly, in November I was itching to get out in the garden and do something. So mulching seemed a treat! (I know, I’m bonkers!)
Mulching in 2022
When I do my March mulching I may well use a very good mulching product called Strulch, recommended to me by my neighbour Desi. Strulch is particularly good if slugs and snails are an issue. The marmitey/malty smell of the stuff (or maybe it’s the texture), seems to deter them. So I will treat my semi-shaded border, which contains at least 15 hostas (slug magnets), with a delicious thick layer of the stuff. As for my sunny border, I may use well-rotted farmyard manure (sorry Desi!)
Lavender Line
No cottage garden is complete without lavender. I have a lovely line of lavender (Angustifolia) which runs alongside a pathway leading to my potting shed. I don’t normally talk about this as it’s no trouble and simply looks fab. But lavender can start getting a bit old and leggy, especially if you don’t prune it back properly. I think a few of my lavender plants are beginning to head this way. So I’m going to potentially replace a couple of them as part of my cottage garden plans for this year. Ideally I’d do this using my own cuttings which I’ve grown on. But for some reason (stupidity) I haven’t taken any lavender cuttings – gah!
Cottage Garden Plans – Semi Shaded Border
My semi-shaded woodland style border, the one with all the hostas in it, needs a bit of attention. It looks wild (like a lot of my garden) but with its colour scheme of mainly lime green, white and purple, it looks pretty good from early Spring until the end of June.
The border is full of snowdrops, primroses and hellebores early on in the year. These are followed by hostas, ferns, polygonatum and silene fimbriata.
A layer of sweet woodruff forms a white carpet under one of the old apple trees in the bed. The bed is informally edged with white fluffy tiarellas (Emerald Ellie) – such a wonderful plant. All of this is backed by three large lime green euphorbias. To top everything off, in May and June the whole border is rammed with alliums (Purple Sensation).
But once the alliums have finished, the border definitely loses its mojo. It lacks colour. Box balls provide strucutre but otherwise it just looks scruffy. That’s a real risk with informal cottage garden planting.
Late interest comes in the form of the giant crocosmia Lucifer. But while it’s a very handsome plant and is spreading nicely in the border, it’s a bright hot orangey-red. I’m not sure that colour fits. The blooms are relatively short-lived and once they’ve finished it’s a very scruffy plant. So the whole area just looks worse!
Not So Shaded!
To add a layer of complexity, the light conditions in this bed have also changed. That’s because a big tree which was providing some of the shade has come down. This may be good news for the nepeta and roses which I rather rashly planted in the ‘woodland’ border. I know, I know – completely daft! With more light they may now flourish a bit better. But if they don’t, they will need sorting too.
And will the additional light be bad news for my shade loving plants? I’ll have to keep a close eye on that. Oooh this border is going to need some serious thinking about and possibly some bold action in 2022. That has to be top of the list for my cottage garden plans.
Cottage Garden Plans – Shed Removal?
The bottom of our garden features two of the ugliest sheds you will ever see. Seriously, I challenge anyone to have sheds that are bigger eyesores! I’ve done my best to disguise or hide them, but there’s only so much you can do with 15 metres of old sheds, one of which is concrete!
They house Mr F-W’s tools and an awful lot of ‘stuff’ which comes from having four kids. However three of the baby F-Ws have now left home. Furthermore Mr F-W is murmuring that he’s wants to downsize his kit. I’m not pressing the issue. To ensure harmony Mr F-W doesn’t interfere in the garden and I don’t meddle with the sheds. (That’s the unspoken rule which seems to have worked for almost 30 years!)
But if the sheds come down and a smaller, more compact new one is erected to replace them, a whole host of gardening possibilities will open up. With them gone, a 15 meter expanse of Cotswold stone wall at the bottom of the garden will be exposed. There may be room for a greenhouse, another patio, a pergola, a massive new sunny border…so many options.
It may not happen this year – if at all. So I’m not going to get too excited. But I’m going to start some initial thinking now. It’s hard to resist!
Patio
I created a red corner on our wild patio in 2021 and it really looked lovely. A mix of heucheras (Fire Chief), Japanese blood grass, other grasses, ferns, red camellias (Dr King) and red clematis and dahlias. So my cottage garden plans for this year will include a little editing and adding to the area.
As part of this corner I dabbled with an exotic ensete. I’ve never grown one before. It’s tender. So at the moment it sits, chopped back and wrapped up in an old blanket in the potting shed. I will bring it out after the last frost. If it survives, I will feel emboldened to get another and maybe something else! This could be the beginning of a whole foray into exotic plants!
I also need to swap a large mauve clematis (Bernadine) which is currently in a pot in this area, with a fantastic claret red clematis which currently grows again in a container outside my kitchen window. It would look perfect in the red corner.
I know this is simply a matter of moving the pots but I’m slightly nervous about swapping them. Both plants are very happy where they are, so I’m reluctant to disturb them. But as Del Trotter says ‘he who dares wins Rodney.’
So these are my main cottage garden plans for 2022. A lovely mix of practical stuff, editing, monitoring, adding, changing things up and dreaming! What’s on your to do list? Do share – happy gardening x