Rustic cottage garden ideas – 7 tips for creating a stunning garden on a shoestring budget

Kathy and Stuart Pickering created their rustic cottage garden in a stretch of field.

And you can use the same techniques to turn an empty lawn into a haven of colour and scent, filled with butterflies and birdsong.

Their space is equivalent to a long, narrow town garden, measuring around 30ft x 100ft, but the ideas would work in smaller and larger spaces.

And they’ve done it all on a minimum budget, recycling second-hand finds and using virtually no hard landscaping.

Kathy says she knew what she wanted to do, so didn’t have to think about it too much.

Cottage gardens are traditionally informal, but it makes sense to think about how you’re going to break up the space. There’s relatively little hard landscaping in cottage garden style, which makes it a good budget choice – Kathy’s seating area uses wood chip instead of pavers, the paths are grass and they made the arches themselves from hazel branches.

All the furniture and pots are bought from yard sales, car boot fairs or passed down by friends.

There’s more about cottage garden style and how to achieve it here.

Kathy marked out her garden zones with poles and paths. It starts with an open lawn area at the beginning.

Then the heart of the flower garden is a series of four borders on either side of a central path, going down to a second open meadow area at the bottom. If your garden area is long and narrow, this way of dividing it into zones across the space works very well to make it feel larger and blur the boundaries.

There are more tips for dividing up a long narrow garden here and read this if you have a very small narrow garden.

Kathy created her borders in the easiest way. She and Stuart marked out the areas of