English Cottage Garden

Leisure, Exploration, Aesthetic

The English Cottage Garden became popular through the workings of Gertrude Jekyll. Key features of a English Cottage Garden include specific attention to color and aesthetic - creating a composition similar to an impressionistic painting. Naturalistic garden beds featured diverse species at varieties of height and color that lasted for the entirety of the spring, summer, and fall seasons.

Key Elements

Naturalistic, informal planting beds

Attention to color, texture, and scale to create aesthetic

Season-long bloom periods

Tightly packed plantings that allow for plants to form communal benefits in growth and style

Allotment for planting exploration and cultivation

Morphology

Minimal topographic manipulation

Emphasis on planting beds rectangular in form

informal boundaries Walls formed by geometric hedges

Natural Systems

Continuous new bloom throughout the season

Attention to plant communities and relationships

Experimentation, cultivation, propagation, and transportation of plant species

Spatial Organization

Loose, rectilinear organization

Planting beds

Increase in height as plants move back from boarder

360 surrounding of the home

Key Designers

Gertrude Jekyll

Notable qualities of Gertrude Jekyll include her independence as a women during a male-dominate era. Jekyll’s persona described above is reflected early on in her life as she was one of the first women to study painting at the Central School of Design. Jekyll became a prominent garden artist during the Arts and Crafts movement as she paid specific attention to color and texture - a trait partially due to Jekyll’s admiration for the qualities of Impressionist paintings.

Christopher 'Cristo' Lloyd

Christopher Lloyd began gardening at an early age - later becoming a horticulturalist. Lloyd’s knowledge of plant species, cultivars, and care allowed him to create gardens of mass variety. Lloyd’s most notable characteristics are his attention to and knowledge of individual plant species and care. Lloyd plays with composition, similar to Gertrude Jekyll, but is focused on the plant community and care to create aesthetic.

Penelope Hobbhouse

Penelope Hobhouse is the most recent garden designer to embody the English Cottage style. Despite designing gardens from that mimic landscapes from various periods and areas, Hobhouse often follows similar guidelines that reflect the English Cottage garden with her attention to overall composition through color, informal plantings within bedding and shrub walls. Hobhouse most notably stressed the concept of companion planting, allowing plants to enhance each other's features.