Cottage Gardens

A celebration of a beloved and uniquely British garden style featuring cottage gardens from around the country. Features gardens created by famous writers including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter. A celebration of a beloved and uniquely British garden style. The cottage garden's abundant, informal style is rooted in Victorian dreams of a perfect country life. But it has found new expressions from the Arts & Crafts movement to the present day. This book showcases a selection of National Trust cottage gardens, famous and obscure, including writer Thomas Hardy’s cottage in Dorset; the flower-filled cottage garden created at Sissinghurst, Kent, by Vita Sackville-West and harold Nicolson; the Tudor manor Cothele in Cornwall, Beatrix Potter's Cumbrian home, Hill Top, and the picturesque Alfriston Clergy House in East Sussex. Cottage Gardens also features some of the most famous non-National Trust examples from around the country, including Kelmscott Manor, Dove Cottage and Eastgrove Cottage Garden. With practical advice on creating your own cottage garden, including key plants and techniques, this is a wonderful companion for all garden enthusiasts. With climbing roses, bright hollyhocks, pathways edged with honeysuckle, blossom-filled orchards and wildflower meadows, this is the perfect book to capture the idyllic British country garden.

'A picture-book pretty appreciation of an enduringly popular garden style, underpinned with a solid foundation of sensible and knowledge able advice…a worthwhile addition to the genre.'

Claire Masset is currently the Guidebooks Publisher for the National Trust. She was formerly the Gardens Editor of the English Garden Magazine and freelance journalist for publications including Country Life and Gardens Illustrated. She is the author of Secret Gardens and Roses and Rose Gardens for the National Trust as well as Department Stores, Orchards, and Tea for Shire Publishing.