Back Issue, May/June 1998
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Lessons from a Cottage Garden
by Nancy DuBrule
I came to gardening via a rather circuitous route. I grew up in Hartford and never had a garden until I went away to school at the University of Connecticut. After much soul-searching, I surprised my family and friends by going into horticulture. When I graduated from the agricultural school, I really thought I knew what gardening was all about.
In school, I was taught a very conventional style of gardening. Plants were to be properly spaced, planted according to certain rules, staked, trimmed, pruned and propped up. Beds were to be edged neatly. Weeds were to be eradicated. And this is essentially what I saw in gardens until I met Lucie Carlin. Lucie taught me about the cottage gardening style Ñ lessons that cannot be learned from books or in the classroom.
You don't have to garden by the books
I vividly remember the first time I visited Lucie's garden. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Chaos reigned. Plants were crowded together and nothing was spaced according to the rules I had learned in school. Weeds grew between the poppies and irises. Roses and vines climbed over the house. I had never encountered a garden like hers Ñ it touched a place deep down in my soul.
As I hung around in her garden, sharing coffee and conversation, I began to realize that the neighbors walking by were also deeply touched by this garden. People would stop to chat. It was a magnet. It had an irresistible lure. Thus, I learned my first lesson: you don't have to garden by the books. Rules are meant to be broken, and the results can be charming. A garden is a very personal thing. You do not have to have a lot of book knowledge, and certainly not a fancy degree, to have a beautiful garden.
A weed is a plant growing in the wrong place
When I became Lucie's gardener, I began to pull out weeds and define the edges. Lucie immediately came running over and started yelling at me to stop! "First of all," she said, "don't edge the beds and make them look like a city garden. Leave it be." But her second statement blew my mind. "Don't pull out the weeds unless you know what they are. How do you know that they won't have a pretty flower?" And so I learned my next lesson: a weed is simply a plant growing in the wrong place. What is a weed to me is not necessarily a weed to someone else! Learn to think differently. Leave some plants in your cottage garden that you would normally remove.
Lucie made me leave the dandelions in the garden when I had been taught various toxic ways to eradicate this most unwanted of weeds. Queen-Anne's-lace was her favorite flower, beating out the hundreds of cultivated "fancy plants" that filled her yard. Celandine poppies were called "butterfly weed" by Lucie and were encouraged to seed and grow everywhere bringing a cheerful yellow color to the early spring garden.
"Weeds," if allowed in the garden, must be ruthlessly thinned.
Most people think that nothing could be easier than growing weeds, but the opposite is true. Managing "weeds" can be tricky. You cannot turn your back and expect them to grow naturally because they will become the garden, overtaking the cultivated plants. They self-sow rampantly, insuring their spread and survival in the wild. I found it necessary to quickly deadhead these plants as soon as they finished blooming, leaving only a limited amount to set seed for the following year.
The celandine poppies were yanked out of the garden as soon as they were done blooming, as they would turn yellow and look unsightly as the weather warmed. Because they are related to impatiens, they shoot out abundant seeds before they are removed, thus assuring continued generations of "butterfly weed" for years to come.
Once I got the hang of it, finding the "weeds" and weaving them into the garden tapestry became fun. Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate sprang up at the base of the Sedum 'Autumn Joy'. Its long rosy colored thin spikes bloomed at the same time as the flat topped flowers of the sedum and they were exactly the same color.
After hurricane Gloria, a tree fell down and topsoil was brought in to fill the huge hole left by the upended roots. This soil contained the seeds of Silene dioica, a lovely pink wildflower that started springing up all over the place. It took me a few years to figure out its real name, but meanwhile, it became a welcome addition to the garden. If I had followed the "rules" and weeded it out because it was foreign, I never would have discovered it. Now I purposely plant it in other cottage gardens.
I learned to recognize wild aster seedlings. By careful selection, the fall garden was soon filled with white, lavender and blue asters, thousands of tiny starflowers softening the bolder effects of the mums and sedums.
Two categories of plants work best: fast growing plants ... and invasive plants
In a cottage garden the plants face very stiff competition. Because regular spacing is thrown out the window and plants are crowded together, plants must be tough to survive. Two categories of plants work best: fast growing, robust plants that can elbow their way through their competition and invasive plants that either spread quickly or self sow abundantly. Many of these plants would be considered much too greedy to plant in the average garden, but their aggressive tendencies fit in perfectly with the cottage garden style.
Dare to try invasive perennials that you probably wouldn't use in a normal garden (such as circle flower, lady bells, mallow). In some cases, placing them in crowded gardens slows their growth down to manageable levels.
However, invasive plants that continue to grow aggressively must be managed aggressively: you must manage them like they are "weeds" and be ruthless about taming them. You can't just plant them and walk away, thinking they will fight it out and coexist. The strongest plant will win, and you will lose the diversity and succession of bloom in that bed.
Never pull out any plant if you dont know what it is
Self-sown plants are free gifts from nature that form the backbone of the cottage gardening style. They add serendipity to the cottage garden because they don't always come up where you expect them to. Once you get into the swing of cottage gardening you allow these plants to come up and create combinations that you would never think of.
There are two problems with self-sown plants. The first is to be able to recognize the young seedlings immediately when they spring up, and then make the judgement whether to move them if they are in the wrong place. Never pull out any plant if you don't know what it is. If you are not sure, wait and observe the plant for one growing season.
The second problem with self-sown plants is that if your garden is really crowded, the young seedlings won't mature due to lack of light. In this case, be sure to find the babies and pull away some of the leaves of the surrounding plants so that light can get to them. Lucie used to call this "making windows."
A cottage garden is never too full
Lucie's garden contained over 50 rosebushes, 90 percent of which were 'Simplicity' roses, a single pink shrub rose with an all season bloom period. How she latched onto this variety, I will never know. (Although it probably had something to do with the letters that "Mr. Perkins" sent to her each winter, with unbelievable offers that she could not refuse.) But 'Simplicity' was the rose of choice, and every spring at least a dozen new plants would arrive bare root.
Lucie would never believe me when I told her that she already had over 50 roses in her garden and didn't need anymore. Which leads me to the next vital lesson of the cottage garden: it is never too full to add more plants. Battles raged each year as I would walk around and point out the dormant rose bushes, complaining all the while that there simply wasn't one spot left to plant them. But, as you can probably guess, plant them I did, and they became the signature plant of her magnificent June display.
The final lesson is this: Dare to garden in the way that YOU want to
Read books and magazines, watch the gardening television shows, observe every beautiful garden that you can lay your eyes on, ask questions of more experience gardeners everywhere you go. And then, do whatever you want to do. Create your own private patch of paradise. And do it your way. It will probably be a masterpiece, because it will spring from your soul, and touch others as Lucie's garden did for so many years.
Lucie Carlin died in the winter of 1998 at the age of 89. As I write this, spring is coming to Connecticut, and I am facing my first gardening season in 15 years without her garden to work in. Will the new owners of her house continue her garden? It is unlikely. A vision like hers, and the strong will to carry it out over a lifetime, is a rare gift.
Nancy DuBrule is the owner of Natureworks and a past president of NOFA/CT. She is the co-author, with Marny Smith of Rowayton, of the book A Country Garden for Your Backyard (Rodale Press, 1993).
What is a Cottage Garden?
Today, cottage gardening has come to represent a certain style, with abundant flowers overflowing crowded beds, roses and vines clambering over houses and arbors soft, graceful gardens that defy the uninspired formality and rigid lines found in most American suburbs. Designing a cottage garden on paper is an impossibility. The bones of the garden can be defined: fences, arbors, roses, flowering shrubs, peonies, irises, and such but the plants that really make the garden wild and free flowing have to be added over time, according to the whims and fancies of the gardener.
Lucie Carlin's garden was already 50 years old when I met her. Set on less than an acre of land by the sea, it contained the "bones" planted by her aunts many years before. The boundaries of the property were thick with hedges of forsythia, lilac and bridal wreath spirea. Throughout her yard, forming backdrops for the garden beds, were old fashioned flowering shrubs such as beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) and weigelia. The flower beds themselves were overgrown tangles of invasive, familiar plants such as poppies, irises, daffodils, violets, rudbeckias, helianthus, and Dame's-rocket (Hesperis matronalis).
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