Growing a Cottage Garden to Fit Today's Busy Lifestyle | Gardener's Path

Are you one of today’s harried urban gardeners, with less time to putter but more need to relax? Feel married to your lawn most of the year, but not particularly happy with the high-maintenance ol’ gal?

Time-consuming demands on today’s busy homeowners don’t leave much spill-over for outdoor necessaries such as mowing, fertilizing, mulching, and weeding, let alone flower gardening!

So you might think the very idea of attempting one of those flower-filled, meandering, paths-crossed, bench-friendly cottage gardens is ludicrous.

But you’d be wrong!

Now, even the busiest weekend gardener can stop to smell the roses. And the sweet peas. And the bee balm. And the cottage pinks. And the peonies.

The best news? You won’t suffer burnout for the effort.

Forget babysitting tidy rows of tiny marigolds or hoeing down weeds around puny peppers. Put your energy into turning that time-consuming, picture-perfect front lawn and its orderly floral border into a twining, climbing, delightfully dissembling cottage garden!

Think about it: Cascading confections of dusty pink and red climbing roses… a tall sea of blue-gray Russian sage… masses of bright blue forget-me-nots… fragrant magenta peonies… towering hollyhocks … tall, lusciously pearled foxgloves… the ever-faithful and quite prolific black-eyed Susan… the perennial offerings today are as varied as they are enticing!

Sounds like a lot of work, but it’s not. Maintenance-free is the watchword for today’s weekend gardeners, just as it was for the cottagers who devised and perfected this style of gardening several hundred years ago.

The original cottage gardens were riots of color and fragrance,