Photo Friday - English Cottage Garden

Here we are on the second ‘episode’ of what I hope will be a continuing part of my blog – Photo Friday.

For anyone who missed the explanation last Friday, Photo Friday probably won’t have anything at all to do with making cards.  Every Friday I’ll be showing photos that have, for one reason or another, struck a chord with me – sometimes it will be photos that I or my family and friends have taken, sometimes it will be photos I’ve stumbled across while surfing the net.

I'm really pleased that a lot of readers seemed to like the first one so I hope this one meets with your approval too…

A few years ago I was out on a ramble with my hubby and kids.  I’m ashamed to say I forget exactly where this photo was taken, but if I had to guess I think it was in the beautiful Derbyshire Dales.  I remember the walk had been a long and exhausting one by our standards, and I recall we were all feeling a little bit tired and a little subdued.  The laughing and joking had long since subsided and we were all wanting the end of the walk to come soon – at times like these I hope and pray for a little tearoom to suddenly appear out of nowhere… a cosy café with a very large selection of cakes and sticky buns! And in a perfect World there would even be a taxi waiting to take me back to my car!

But as we trudged down a quiet country lane I happened to look to my left and this beautiful cottage garden just took my breath away.  It is superb, down to every little detail.

I won’t pretend to know a great deal about gardening but I do know that when it comes to planting a cottage garden, informality is key, and that style has been brilliantly realised here.  I feel that whoever put this garden together has an artist’s (or crafter’s!) eye.  No space is wasted – there are even plants growing in the cracks in the steps.

The whole thing looks so natural on first glance, as though all these plants just seeded themselves around naturally, but when I looked again I could see all the hard work that had gone into it… the container in the foreground, almost hidden by other plants, the hanging baskets breaking up the harsh line of the grey guttering, the cute little horseshoe nailed to the door… they’re all little things by themselves - but put together with the borders that are packed with flowers and bursting with colour, spilling over onto the path and highlighted by the late afternoon sunshine, and you have the whole picture, which never fails to make me smile every time I look at this photo.

And it never fails to make me very jealous indeed!