My design faux pas

How I designed completely the wrong garden in entirely the wrong place... and how I redeemed myself!

Before moving into our 17th century cottage, we rented. For years! During that time, gardening consisted of mowing a rather agricultural lawn and trimming hedges (badly). Oh and caring for two potted acers. When we moved here, to our Oxfordshire cottage, we finally had our own garden. I was inspired, brimming with excitement, yet at the same time completely petrified. 

I now owned a third acre, triangular plot, on a hill, surrounded by mature trees. I knew practically nothing about gardening. The garden was largely derelict and massively overgrown. Apart from installing miles of new close-board fencing and constructing a terrace (to level some of the back garden), the first few years consisted mainly of wrestling ivy and brambles, cutting back and ripping out.

The Cottage Garden

The first actual ‘garden’ to be made is what we now call the Cottage Garden. It’s effectively the ‘front garden’, the main garden you see from the front of the house and bedrooms, on the righthand side as you pull into the driveway. It measures roughly 20m x 8m, is loosely rectangular, north-facing, dry and shady.

All those incredibly important discussions and debates that I’ve talked through in my earlier post… yep, we did none of that! We went straight into the aesthetics, without a single thought to anything else. We both like formal gardens, so that seemed a good place to start. The design, the symmetry, the complexity of knot gardens, the evergreen topiary. So, why not create one of those? Admittedly, ‘knot gardens’ were well beyond my pay grade, but some grass, symmetrical planting, and evergreen topiary…? I could do.

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We set about the garden as almost every new gardener does. We laid a lawn. A lush green velvety lawn of freshly delivered turf. Lovely! There was just enough room for four meagre borders to wrap around the edge, barely deep enough for a box ball (buxus) and a few small hebes. The garden was very orderly and nearly symmetrical. A white metal bench was installed as a focal point and a place to admire our horticultural achievements. All very neat. I even went as far as covering the ‘well dug’ soil with bark chippings.

“There!” I thought. “Smart!” I thought. “This is easy!” I thought.

While writing this, a memory just popped into my mind. Before the plant buying bonanza, I rather astutely performed a soil test. A simple kit from the local garden centre. Dark green was the reading. “Green? That’s neutral isn’t it…?” I delved far, faaarrrr back into my memories of GCSE Chemistry. “Yep, that’s right!”

I can’t even blame the arrogance of youth… I was 40! I didn’t even bother to read the instructions, even though I was staring at light grey soil full of stones… As I discovered later, dark green on a soil test is alkaline. Actually, it’s about as strongly alkaline as you can get!!

The first monochromatic incarnation of the Cottage Garden

From day one, this new monochromatic formal garden just didn’t feel ‘quite right’. Something was off. But, we persevered, filling in some of the bark-chipped gaps with herbaceous perennials and a handful of spring flowering bulbs. Then a few mophead hydrangeas, that’d been living in pots, on the newly constructed terrace. Although Mrs T.G.K. absolutely LOVES! blue hydrangeas, our strongly alkaline soil transformed those soft blue hues into vivid bubblegum pinks. Oops!

Apart from the complete and total lack of understanding of soil, light, aspect, plants and plant needs, there was a feeling that the garden just did not sit with the old cottage. It felt entirely separate and oddly disconnected from everything.

Soon, the plants were suffering in the heavy shade and dry, alkaline soil. It was all unraveling. Plants etiolated. Leaves yellowed or defoliated altogether. The birds happily threw the bark chippings all over my precious, pristine lawn. Stressed plants lured in hungry pests. It was startling just how stressful it was. After all, making a garden is child’s play, surely?!

I truly berated myself for screwing it up! I felt like a total failure.

Progression and development

The more we visited other gardens and viewed other gardens from the comfort of the sofa, it finally dawned on us that, as much as we like formal gardens, they are not what we LOVE! We like evergreen structure, yes, but the gaps in between should be full and fluffy, burgeoning and romantic, with life and colour abound. Maximalist planting! So, the entire concept of our garden was wrong from the start.

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It’s glaringly obvious that our first journey into gardening was riddled with mistakes and schoolboy errors. However, this was essential learning and wholly redeemable. Those poor pink hydrangeas, baking in the only area of full sun, were moved into richer soil, under dappled shade, and watered with an irrigation line. Roses replaced them, thriving in the sunshine, there deep roots finding the nutrient rich clay, they filled the driveway with perfume. The buxus balls were repositioned and the remnants of the sorry-looking hebes were removed entirely. 

View of the Cottage Garden planting

I changed the plant list to include more calciphiles (plants that thrive in lime rich alkaline soils) and looked to the Cottage Garden classics for more inspiration: Alchemilla, hardy geraniums, lupins, astrantias, clematis, salvias, nepeta, and foxglove were introduced. The garden became altogether more ‘cottagy’, loose and relaxed. It was astonishing, just how quickly the garden began to meld and associate itself with the house. Everything started to feel right. The fluffy cottage garden planting flowed with our higgledy-piggledy home. 

There have been further refinements down the years. Plants have been moved around, along with minor redesigns, plus a lot of learning. But, the relaxed and more romantic cottagy style has remained.

I more than doubled the depth of all the borders and cut a new border to draw a boundary between the Cottage Garden and the new Kitchen Garden. Yew hedges and yew topiary now anchor the border planting and provide year round structure. The roses still thrive and the planting around them is now settled with Alchemilla mollis, Geranium ‘Rozanne’, and Salvia ‘Caradonnna’.

The mophead hydrangeas were eventually removed and used as a cut flower hedge in the new Cutting Garden. I replaced them all with Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’, lots of Japanese anemones, ferns, shade-loving hardy Geraniums, and Pulmonaria.

The trees, after a stay of execution, were merely thinned out. Weedy, self-sown ash trees were removed, along with a diseased plum, and a very lop-sided fir tree that had sprouted right next to an ash. The mature ash trees had crown-reductions and the largest was re-pollarded. The tree-works thinned canopies and reduced heights, creating gaps and pushing back the shadow line. Sunlight reaching the ground unimpeded was massively increased and moisture demands from the trees, much reduced.

I now had a far better understanding of ‘light’. Full sun, part sun, part shade, dappled shade, light shade, deep shade... I know what they mean and, most importantly, how they translate to this garden. The only area of the Cottage Garden in full sun is the rose border and almost everything else is part shade, or dappled. The one area of deep/full shade is amongst the hornbeams, but obviously only when they're in leaf.

The only thing to remain unchanged was the bench! That stayed as it was both a focal point from the house and a lovely place to sit in the heat of summer, under the dappled shade of the ash. I opened the ‘railway sleeper’ retaining wall, built steps and covered the rest of the wall with yew hedging, bringing the garden just a little closer to the house. 

With the expansion of the Courtyard Garden, reaching out into the drive, only the garage stands between Cottage Garden and the Cottage and even this is bridged by the wisteria. The entire scene feels ever more encompassing. The garden associates with the old cottage. It’s accessible with a good focal point and a lovely place to sit. The planting reflects the aspect, soil, and light conditions. At last it’s all in balance and connected.

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Coming up…

The mid-winter tidy! By now, many gardens will have been battered by autumn storms, ice, and snow. Some plants die-ff majestically and beautifully… others collapse into an ugly mush, or break and carelessly scatter themselves across the garden. My approach is gentle but methodical, always keeping an eye out for overwintering wildlife needing cover.