Sloping cottage garden
Garden project: design using the slope as an advantage
We transformed the space in this beautiful Cotswold cottage garden to make it more manageable and practical.
The owner of this garden found that it had become too much of a chore to maintain it. She enjoys entertaining and required more seating areas from which to see the garden and the wonderful views it enjoys. The garden is on a slope from the house down to the bottom area where we decided to create a seating area, using the slope as an advantage. We set to work with a complete makeover of the garden and completely transformed the space, creating a series of extra outdoor 'rooms' for entertaining and relaxing.
Unity and flow
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 manged to keep the spirit of a typical, traditional cottage garden.Â
Garden before
Garden after
Project images
