Do you have a cottage garden and if so what plant do you have?

[KiteKit]

Just that really. We live rurally and I always had a dream of having one of those romantic cottage gardens. we have lived here 10yrs and only got the money to start looking at the garden about 3yrs ago. We only have 1/3rd of an acre and most of it is grass and stone walls and old trees. We created one long bed at the front of the house, it is also about 4ft wide (or deep) so actually fecking huge when we started trying to fill it with plants. We did not have the finances to just kit it out at a garden centre so slowly over the past 3 yrs we have worked on it, buying plants in adli etc when they were the right ones. It has been slow progress.

Our only rule is that they have to be perennial plants - plant once and no more, dh hates annuals, they look so beautiful but then they die and you have to do it all again the next year.

We have lupins, foxgloves, tulips, muscari, primroses, alliums, peoney roses, helebores, hyacinths, snowdrops, cowslips, round box's to intersperse, campanula, bay, strawberries, blueberry bush, dog roses, rambling rose, agapanthus, hollyhock (may have dies) hydrangas and lots of acquilegia's, delphinium (may have died) calla lillies, giant daisies, lambs ear

It still looks a bit sparse in places - what else would you recommend?

Please tell me about your gardens!

Borage of course to go with your mint in your Pimms. It is an annual but self seeds, hurrah! So so pretty, too.

would you go for some hight? Winter honey suckle and witch hazel have the most fab scent and flower in the bleaker calender months, easy to maintain and niether grow massive.
Lavender is easy with many different types, heathers are also good, but on good soil may need some pruning! An apple tree is also easy to look after, stunning in the spring and if you keep it pruned will not dominate your garden (but be warned trees which have been grafted on to cheap root stock will be more trouble than they are worth bloody Lidl so called patio plum tree ended up being dominated but some wild fuckoff prunus that we now struggle to controlled and has invaded our garden big time its also bloody thorny Other plants Echinacea (?spelling) slightly tender but awsome plant and will come up year after year, sweet pea and zefron druer (spelling?) beautiful thornless rose with powerful smell.

Anemones are very easy to divide at this time of year and although they love shade, I find they do well in sun too. Cornus is good for filling up, when it is pruned in spring I stick the prunings in the ground and they take easily.
I let some grow tall as a natural support for clematis. My favourite is midwinter fire which looks like flames in the winter.

Another bulky plant is sedum. It has lovely seed heads all through winter. I have lots of these and in May when they are a bout 18 inches tall I cut half of the plants back to about 8 inches. This way I get a variety of heights.

Your garden sounds lovely.

www.amazon.co.uk/Geoff-Hamiltons-Cottage-Gardens-Hamilton/dp/0563383488

I bought this book when it first came out, it was a great help in the beginning (and available for 0.01p! these days).

I have a well established cottage garden, a lot of the plants above, things that just get better with every year (bigger too), foxgloves, delphiniums, lupins nepeta, all can be grown very easily from seed.

Mine is a riot of colour from May onwards, lots of bulbs out now but not much else other than nepeta, primroses and a couple of things I can't remember the name of.

I do have to trim it back heavily a couple of times during the summer otherwise the colourful riot just looks neglected.