Cottage Garden Flowers

Cottage Garden Perennial Flowering Plants Perennials are the backbone of the cottage garden border – the flowers that reliably come up year after year and provide colour and structure.

Flowers include euphorbia, tulip, peony

Cottage garden stalwarts include delphiniums, aquilegias, lavender, phlox, candytuft and pinks. Choose plants you love that will grow well where you live. Hollyhocks are worth a special mention, traditionally they were planted against the cottage wall. Not only do they grow very happily in a dry situation where other plants struggle, but in the past, before damp proof courses, they helped to keep the foundations dry by drawing moisture out of the walls.

Cottage Garden Annual & Biennial Flowering Plants

This is the fun bit – filling spaces in the borders and containers with easy to grow annuals like calendula, cornflowers, love-in-the-mist and nasturtiums, not forgetting biennial forget-me-nots and foxgloves. Get the conditions right and they will self seed and before you know it the garden will have that classic cottage garden look you are after. Seed can be scattered on bare earth, or to get ahead and have earlier flowers, seed can be sown in autumn to overwinter in a coldframe or greenhouse.

Newly pricked out hardy annuals