Beauty and Abundance

British Cottage Gardens

Originally the small plots where rural British workers grew the vegetables, herbs, and flowers they needed, cottage gardens were romanticized and reimagined by nostalgic Victorian gardeners into a bucolic idyll.

The style has endured ever since: drifts of colorful perennials mingle with fragrant roses, boisterous self-seeders teeter on the brink of chaos, fruit and vegetables scramble through rustic supports. Small in scale, wildlife friendly, natural, and organic, 'old-fashioned' cottage gardens are perfectly in tune with gardening in the modern day.

Featuring some of the most beautiful examples of cottage gardens in the UK today, these incredible spaces will transport you into a distinctly British world of peonies, foxgloves, roses and dahlias, with interviews with the designers and head gardeners featured to provide plenty of inspiration for bringing your own cottage garden to life.

Clare Foggett is the editor of The English Garden magazine, the UK’s best-selling luxury gardening magazine. A qualified horticulturist, she trained at Pershore College of Horticulture, and has worked in gardening publishing for the past 20 years, spending time at the RHS on members’ magazine The Garden, and 12 years at Bauer’s weekly title, Garden News. She’s a voluntary postholder for the Hardy Plant Society for whom she edits the HPS’s biannual magazine Cornucopia and is a member of the RHS Herbaceous Plant Committee. She is also a former chair of the Garden Media Guild, the association that brings together gardening media professionals.

Jonathan Buckley (Photographs by) 

Jonathan Buckley is an award-winning specialist garden and flower photographer who has been sole photographer on over 30 books, as well as contributing to a wide range of magazines and newspapers worldwide. Awards have included the Garden Media Guild Garden Photographer of the Year, Features Photographer of the Year and Single Image of the Year.