Gardening Ideas from the Weatherstaff PlantingPlanner Blog

Splashes of Sunlight – 5 Cheerful Flowers for Early Spring

After months of grey, damp winter, a splash of early yellow flowers brings a shot of spring into the garden.

Yellow sings of warmth and sunshine. It’s the colour of happiness and optimism. Here are 5 gorgeous, cheer-uppers for gardeners.

Daffodils

While daffodils are at their peak in April, Welsh people need their daffodils in full bloom for March 1st, St David’s Day, so it’s great that so many varieties are early flowerers. Plant daffodil bulbs in autumn for a glorious swathe of sunlight in spring.

One of the earliest daffodils to flower is Narcissus ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’, growing to 40cm in height. It can flower as early as January in sheltered spots. February Gold is another early daffodil and...

Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) for flower borders

If you love charm over elegance, profusion over minimalism, natural haphazardness over control and order, the chances are that you love the cottage garden style.

Annuals and Self-Seeders

Cottage gardens are all about abundance of planting and random drifts of colour. Ground covering plants weave through the planting, spilling over border edges and stitching everything together. In the same way, scattering the seeds of annuals amongst the permanent planting will plug any gaps and contribute to the random charm of the design.

Annuals are plants which germinate, flower and set seed all in one year. They die after flowering, but many will helpfully self-seed leaving a new generation of flowers to appear the following spring.

Annuals are perfect for a...

Rosa Generous Gardener perfect for cottage garden planting plan

If you love charm over elegance, profusion over minimalism, natural haphazardness over control and order, the chances are that you love the cottage garden style.

Vertical Accents

By their very nature, cottage gardens are charmingly informal and unstructured. A sea of colourful flowers all swaying at the same height could end up lacking interest and a focal point, but, fortunately, several of the classic cottage garden plants naturally provide striking architectural structure, in the form of tall spires of flowers.

Hollyhocks, delphiniums and foxgloves all create vertical accents amongst low-growing flowers.

Delphiniums are stately perennials in ravishing shades of blues, pinks and mauves, as well as white. They are a bit demanding, as they like sun, a rich soil and...

Crocuses - spring bulls perfect for naturalising in grass

If you’re just a new green shoot in the world of gardening, you’ll find there’s a whole new language to learn!

Seasoned gardeners will casually mention their tender perennials, talk of lifting their corms and dividing their tubers, or bemoan the chlorosis of their blueberries. If you’re nodding sagely, thinking yes, that reminds me – must go and do a bit of rhizome splitting and add sequestered iron to the shopping list, then this blog post is clearly not for you.

On the other hand, if you’re not sure whether they are discussing their ailments or brass bands, then you may find this post helpful!

When I potted up my first large container, I chose some flowers from the garden...

If you love charm over elegance, profusion over minimalism, natural haphazardness over control and order, the chances are that you love the cottage garden style.

The Daisies

Traditional cottage garden favourites are daisy-style flowers, such as asters, fleabane daisies, coreopsis and echinacea.

Coreopsis verticillata ‘Grandiflora’ has cheery yellow, starry flowerheads, carried in abundance on wiry stems in summer.

Asters come in shades of white, pink, purple and blue. I love Aster pyrenaeus ‘Lutetia’, for its starry flowerheads in palest lilac, with yellow centres. It has a long flowering season from mid-summer to mid-autumn and is completely resistant to powdery mildew – a disease which plagues many asters.

Erigeron karvinskianus (Mexican Fleabane) is a delightful long-flowering perennial, spreading by rhizomes to...

Exuberant planting in a cottage style landscape design

If you love charm over elegance, profusion over minimalism, natural haphazardness over control and order, the chances are that you love the cottage garden style.

Planting will be exuberant, with self-seeding annuals and low-maintenance perennials packed in together and spilling over border edges. Climbers scramble over fences, garden gates and trees.

Historically, gardens for pleasure were the preserve of the wealthy. Cottage gardens were for the poorer levels of society and were purely functional. The first cottage gardens met the needs of early tenant farmers, by providing the vegetables, herbs and fruit which formed the mainstay of their diet.

Vegetables included garlic, onions, cabbages and beans. A fruit tree here and there offered shade, as well as its crops of...