Cottage Garden Flowers

Plant Old Fashioned Flowers for Traditional Cottage Garden Style

Jul 2, 2007

Learn how to combine favorite old fashioned flowers of all kinds to design your own colorful cottage garden filled with fragrant roses, lilacs, peonies and more.

The beloved traditional cottage garden flowers have been popular in flower gardens seemingly forever. Old fashioned cottage garden flowers are not only charming to look at and easy to grow, but many of these favorite flowers are fragrant, too. The flowers lend themselves to being arranged informally in the garden and many will self seed leading to those overflowing and generous quantities of blooms we associate with the traditional cottage garden style. Along with the annual, biennial and perennial flowers and bulbs, consider growing flowering shrubs, roses, vines and fruit trees (see below) to design a more authentic cottage garden style brimming with all kinds of flowers.

Favorite Cottage Garden Flowers (Perennials)

Favorite Cottage Garden Flowers (Annuals and Biennials)

Favorite Cottage Garden Spring Bulbs

Favorite Cottage Garden Summer Bulbs (Corms Rhizomes and Tubers)

Cottage Garden Flowers Include Roses

Roses and cottage gardens are a natural combination. Whether you grow a modern landscape rose or an old fashioned shrub rose, a climber, or a modern hybrid tea rose, your cottage garden flowers must include roses. Those with large and colorful rose hips will bring an additional season of interest to the garden in fall after the flowers are gone.

Flowering Shrubs for the Traditional Cottage Style Flower Garden

A cottage garden should include not only flowers per se but a bountiful mixture of flowering plants. Consider adding flowering shrubs to bring some year round structure to the garden. The perfumed fragrance of shrubs such as mock orange or lilac wafts through the garden and heightens our enjoyment. With luck, the strong perfume will be carried indoors through a nearby open window.

In an old fashioned cottage garden, flowering and fruiting shrubs such as elderberry, blueberry, brambles and quince would provide not only delightful flowers but also tasty fruit to complement the traditional garden flowers.

Traditional Cottage Garden Flowers Includes Flowering Vines

Annuals such as morning glory, nasturtium, cardinal climber and sweet pea vines can be allowed to weave through shrubs and along fences and arbors to add height to the flower garden.

Perennial vines such as clematis, hops, trumpet vine, Dutchman’s pipe and honeysuckle grow in stature from year to year and produce dramatic effects when in full bloom.

What better way to shade a secret bower or favorite bench than to festoon it with flowering vines. With careful selection, you can plant vines that complement the flowers surrounding them or to extend the season of bloom in your cottage garden.

Flowering Fruit Trees Cast Shade in the Traditional Cottage Garden

In a traditional cottage garden, most likely there is a venerable fruit tree, the time worn apple or crabapple, the plum or pear tree, from which to pluck fruit and hang a child’s rope swing. That same tree offers a shady spot for a summer seat where the gardener may rest while shelling peas or weaving lavender wands.

Shade Flowers and Plants for the Cottage Garden

Shade flowers for planting beneath the tree could include the many wildflowers collected from nearby woods, and certainly old time favorite shade tolerant flowers such as bleeding heart, sweet violet, lungwort, and lily of the valley. (More flowers for shady spots)

Or, the tree may be trained to espalier form to frame a bench or to outline a tidy planting bed and offer a bit of shade and cooling to ornamental leafy summer herbs and vegetables such as fragrant and flavorful mint or spinach, lettuce or fancy leafed chard.

And certainly there is nothing more traditional to the cottage garden scene than a fruit tree in full flower, surrounded by daffodils and jonquils blooming jauntily in the early spring sunshine!

How to Design the Cottage Garden with Favorite Flowers

This description of traditional cottage garden flowers and suggestions on how to place them should help guide you in selecting favorite old fashioned flowers along with roses, flowering vines, shrubs and trees to design and plant in your very own traditional cottage garden. You might also be interested in reading about flowers our grandmothers grew in their gardens.

The copyright of the article Cottage Garden Flowers in Flower Gardens is owned by Barbara M. Martin. Permission to republish Cottage Garden Flowers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.