There were various precious ornaments to be incorporated in the design. With the garden as it was, they were hidden from view among all the plants so Karen decided to make features of them. She used the slope to create gentle pathways leading from one area to another to give unity and flow to the garden.
The key to a good design is to keep it simple. To keep a cottage style garden design low in maintenance requires sticking to plants that do not require too much attention. A typical cottage garden uses annual bedding plants, which are time consuming. Instead, to keep the cottage look, we planted hardy perennial plants that emerge every year and only require cutting back in the autumn. In this way we managed to keep the spirit of a typical, traditional cottage garden.
