What’s Quietly Replacing Traditional Cottage Borders? Designers Are Embracing a Softer, Easier Planting Style This Spring
Let nature take the lead and celebrate a break from form
Cottage garden style is widely recognised as being essentially English with a tiered mix of summer flowering perennials, but today's interpretation is slightly different. While the floral richness, wealth of color and sweet perfume remain, a quietly energised and more confident natural charm is taking over.
While many cottage garden ideas center around displaying standout varieties such as towering delphiniums, foxgloves, lupins, lately garden designers are seamlessly mixing these favorites with tactile grasses, sprawling ground cover and foliage. Often displaying a more harmonious color palette rather than the traditional riot of pick-and-mix florals, the latest borders often appear to be more of a natural extension of the landscape than a deliberately cultivated garden.
If you are looking to plan a border from scratch or rework an existing area of your yard, these planting ideas will help get you started.
Encourage Plants To Bend And Splay
Today’s preference for a softer, fuller cottage garden style encourages plants to be themselves. Stake-free, untrained and left to intermingle, they display an irresistible and unbounded energy, as landscape architect Stacilyn Feldman explains.
‘Loose, expressive and somewhat wild borders are hugely seductive,’ says Stacilyn. ‘Letting flower heads flop and overhang the bedline feels naughty and unexpected. Peonies and Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ are obvious choices for this look, but also consider the lower-level Nepeta, Alchemilla or Tiarella mixed with Nasella (aka Stipa tenuissima) or Carex, and Allium dotted throughout.’
Find potted Annabelle Hydrangea, and other ground cover plants available at Nature Hills.
Blur Border Edges
Traditional cottage borders have a rigid and almost sentinel-like look to them. Although conceived to create a ‘loose’ arrangement of blooms and shrubs, most display an exquisite, tiered framework, with shorter plants at the front sloping up to taller varieties at the rear, leaving little to chance or surprise.
The softer planting that is currently favored by pro designers delights in breaking these rules and has little regard for crisp border edges.
‘An especially unexpected way to add to the charm is to encourage a few things to escape the bed into the adjacent lawn. Ajuga, Stachys and bulbs like Crocus and Narcissus are sweet surprises when they jump the line and find their own place in the sun,’ continues Stacilyn.
There are many plants that will happily oblige and instinctively colonize new ground, including these best bulbs for naturalizing and self seeding flowers. The results are always more subtle and intuitive than any man made planting.
Find a wide selection of crocus bulbs, including Giant Mix and Stripy Pickwick Vernus at Burpee.
Stacilyn is a Principal at Oehme, van Sweden in Washington, DC. She has designed, managed, and shepherded over a decade’s worth of the firm’s landmark projects including green roofs, urban development, botanic gardens, and residential estates. Stacilyn holds a Bachelors of Landscape Architecture from The Pennsylvania State University.
Plant In Irregular Patches
Plant placement is all important when it comes to creating a soft, natural looking border. Rather than opting for a dolly mixture of singular plants dotted around or placed in rows, take inspiration from the natural landscape, plant in swathes and multiples, and discover where to begin with matrix planting.
'You won’t find straight lines, blocky rectangles, or equal spacing in nature,' says landscape architect Kevin Lenhart. 'Rather, you see amorphous, single-species masses, wrapping around each other like the splotches in a camouflage design, occasionally pierced by accent plants.'
Kevin also adds, 'When placing plants, stagger them so they don’t line up in even rows. They should form a triangle if you were to draw lines between three adjacent plants.'
Grasses excel at knitting different plant patches together. Familiarize yourself with the varieties that suit your soil and climate, and select three or five of the best ornamental grasses for winter interest to repeat throughout your border.
Japanese Forest Grass starter plants are available at Walmart, along with Pony Tails Stipa Grass seeds.
Play With Leaf Appeal
Not solely about flower power, new-look Cottage gardens celebrate an artful mix of foliage and natural surfaces too.
‘Texture is often underappreciated,’ says landscape architect Kevin Lenhart. ‘Flower color is showy, and gets all the attention, but leaf texture impacts your design long after flowers drop. Take care to include contrasting textures, such as big and small leaves and a variety of leaf shapes’
Kevin also adds, ‘Fine textures are particularly important for expressing a soft feel. Ferns, grasses, and feathery-leafed plants like Achillea are staples for introducing fine texture into a design.’
Other finely cut foliage plants include the moody black elder - Sambucus nigra f. porphyrophylla Cherry Lace, the silvery tones of Perovskia 'Blue Spire' and fascinating Senecio cineraria 'Silver Dust'.
Pick up bare root perovskia 'Denim n' Lace' plants at Burpee.
Kevin is the Design Director at Yardzen and a licensed landscape architect. He is a LEED-Accredited Professional in Neighborhood Development, and holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. As a designer, Kevin’s practice is rooted in a commitment to making high-quality design available to everyone, and to using design to improve physical, cultural, and ecological well-being.
Disrupt Traditional Borders With Airy Giants
There’s nothing like a rule breaker to liven up the norm, and this applies to cottage garden borders too. Interrupt the carefully orchestrated ranks of flowering perennials with a handful of giant plants to introduce an exciting contrast in scale, structure and movement.
Dot them randomly throughout the border and don't be shy of bringing them to the front edge to add extra depth and drama.
While architectural cardoons and angelica both soar up to 3 to 6ft (90-180cm), filling the space with their striking profiles, grasses introduce a transparent and ethereal quality.
‘Cloud Nine Switchgrass, Panicum virginatum ‘Cloud Nine’ - the tallest cultivar available of this US native classic grass topping out at 7 feet – is a cloud of airy seed heads that catch the golden hour perfectly!,' explains plant expert Megan Foster. 'Let it serve as a dynamic backdrop for Coneflowers or Russian Sage.'
Megan is American Meadows Perennial and bulb expert, and the category manager overseeing perennials and bulbs for AmericanMeadows.com since 2019. With a keen eye for color and passion for pollinators she curates pre-planned gardens for the brand. Her instinct for what gardeners want also drives the spring and fall bulb assortments. She gardens in zone 5 in Vermont.
Encouraging garden borders to create a soft, voluminous look brings a fresh, natural energy to any yard. Develop this magical effect by discovering how to create a native landscape and can you plant wildflowers and perennials together?
If you love inspiring garden ideas, outdoor advice, and the latest news, why not sign up for our newsletter and get the latest features delivered straight to your inbox?
