The Cottage Garden
Garden Rooms at Havenwood Gardens
A South-facing Cottage Garden
This area was lawn in 2014 but now is a beautiful, cozy, plant-filled retreat right at the front of our home. Today, I share a bit about scale, about planting through the seasons and how it is still filled with color at the end of September!
One of the very first gardens we made a decade ago in our zone 5 garden in northwestern Pennsylvania was the Cottage Garden. It is set on a south-facing slope to the road. Our home is a light brown brick which makes a nice backdrop for flowers and blends perfectly with the pea gravel paths. This slope combined with the gravel creates a heat trap in the Cottage Garden which enables me to grow things here that might otherwise die in our cold winters (down to -20 F). T
The Cottage Garden is 60 feet (20 m) wide along the house, and 45 feet (15 m) from the house to the street. The main path, instead of going to the door, actually travels from right to left, east to west, right through the space, nearly parallel to the house. The old front door, which is rarely used now since the driveway is on the other side of the house, we now call the “garden door.”
There is then a secondary path that goes off to the door, and a few smaller paths that go down to the bottom level where we have three metal pergolas, which together give a walkway of 40 feet long.
The house already had eight large arborvitae in front of it when we moved in. We added a yew hedge in the east side, a hemlock hedge on the south street side, and a row of pleached hornbeam on the west to form the three other sides of the rectangle. The entrances to the Cottage Garden are on the east and west sides. Inside are set four planting beds that are not planted symmetrically, but with groups of perennials balanced for size and shape.
When you walk from the east to the west, the main path uses forced perspective to make it seem longer than it is as you walk down through the perennial borders. This helps the garden to feel more human-sized, to scale with its surroundings.
Each garden room at Havenwood does the work of taking a larger unwieldy space and breaking it into manageable, more proportional areas for the gardener and visitor to explore.
"I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one's clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable."
-Gertrude Jekyll
Because it’s September…
our borders are full right now of classic late season perennials:
-Feather Reed grass, Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’
-Joe Pye weed, Eutrochium purpureum (formerly Eupatorium)
-Pink Japanese Anemone, Anemone x hybrida 'Robustissima'
-Reliable Geranium ‘Rozanne’
- Pretty Aster laeve ‘Bluebird’
-I added Eryngium yuccifolium last year, and it looks good this autumn as well.
-Too many white garlic chives, Allium tuberosum, which will need digging out, but really they are just what the garden needs right now as it waits for the white and purple asters to come out. Deadheading the flowers before they drop their seeds will help them to reseed much less.
These borders were planted 7-10 years ago, and have pretty much kept themselves going except for some filling in the planting, weeding and cutting back. There are a few tenacious weeds that have crept in, which means that in a few years time when the building projects settle down, I would like to dig up sections of these borders and redesign them. Kind of like cleaning out your closet every few years, there sometimes needs to be a culling even in a perennial garden in order to keep the plants growing their best. I am really looking forward to that process, as this planting can only improve in second draft on what I have already made so far. Years of observation will be a great help!
“The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives.”
— Gertrude Jekyll
Wonderful post! 🤍
Absolutely beautiful!