It is that garden we have in our mind's eye when we pour over the seed catalogues for the coming season, on grey winter days. It is the garden we dream of when we gaze out of dreary office windows, at the bustling crowds and standstilled traffic.

When the fairy glamour is in full flight, it is the cold, rainy, windswept building site outside our house, where our neighbours see us pottering around in all weathers and judge us mad, but to us it is our little piece of heaven, for we have fairy dust in our eyes............

The Garden

The typical fairy cottage garden is small and somewhat sheltered, full of haunting scents and packed to overflowing with flowers.

It contains the collected treasures of many generations, some grown from cuttings, others found and cherished scraps, but never bought.

Some might have disappeared forever if not rescued. For as times change and rich misguided people throw out good plants to make room for the new, the latest, trendy designs.

True gardeners rescue the castaways of fashion and adopt them and as seasons pass they become old friends.

Cottage Flowers

Once there were many cottages, some even dated from the 16th century, when the country became more settled, after long periods of civil strife, but as the years go by there are fewer and fewer of the original ones.

Roads are widened and towns spread out to accommodate the ever growing population. These picturesque but often inconveniently placed pensioners of a rural past, are often pulled down to make room for bungalows and housing estates.

The newer houses are often as small as the cottages they have replaced but with less room for greenery. The new owners inherit smaller nondescript gardens than those lost gardens, that people still remember with their unpretentious close planting.

Thankfully, those artless, good tempered flowers that once inhabited those sorely missed and once cared for spaces, have still survived. Now, after all these years, though dispossessed, they have become known as “Cottage Flowers”.

Hedges make "good neighbours"

Those fairy cottage gardens were often enclosed by hedge and wall, for “hedges make good neighbours”, and every true cottager was indebted to their “good neighbours”.

Narrow paths of old bricks or stones, bordered with old sea shells, snaked through drifts of bustling flowery crowds.

Even though the gardens often seemed to full, if there was a chance to introduce an old butler sink or loved plant in an old crock, it would be there. Sometimes there would be an old hand pump with leaky bucket and always a water butt to catch that soft rainwater for eventide watering

Old Plums

With no fixed plan for the planting, the plants are put wherever there happens to be room, in the order of their arrival, yet the colours never seem to clash.

Each flower chooses the spot it desires, if the gardener is listening to the whispers in the rustling leaves. Proud hollyhocks tower over dainty daises and pansies gossiping at their feet. Pinks and marigolds mingle with the crown imperials that try to stay in martial rows, like soldiers on parade, but sway helplessly in the gentle breezes.

Hedgerow plants rub shoulders with the refugees from the big house. Perhaps a myrtle can be found, one that was never expected to grow but was planted with hope. Rescued from an old wedding bouquet, misplaced in haste outside the village church.

Here you will find straggly bushes of southernwood, leggy lavender and bustling rosemary, grown big with the years. Sparkling flowers and robust vegetables growing happily alongside each other in the gentle shade of gnarled apple trees and old plums

At the end of the path, roses and honeysuckle twist and flow over the cottage door with jasmine peeping in at the windows and everlasting peas, clambering to find a warm place on the wall, to rest, drenched in gentle sunshine.

Then not content with smothering the face of the cottage, winter jasmine and laurustinus, turn and jostle to form a living porch, resisting the efforts to be carefully shaped and clipped.

Even around the cottage, the old walls themselves, wear flowery garlands of snapdragons and wallflowers, interspersed with stonecrops and Lilliputian ferns.

There is a magical quality to a fairy cottage garden. Plants that are growing so close together, so that no earth can be seen, give a feeling of abundance and happiness.

Shrubs, herbaceous plants and self sown annuals, grow happily together and all the old fashioned flowers are there. The plants seem happier crowded so close, here they are never disturbed and never forgotten.

The old pump could be the only water supply, for once there was no drainage indoors, and all the water that was used, ended up back in the garden. So well watered and protected from harsh winds, these sheltered idylls encourage the flowers to bloom early and long.

The singing of birds, the gentle buzzing of bumblebees on a hazy summer day, among the perfumed air of a hundred different blooms. To be at peace with the world, and knowing everything will be alright in the end.

This is the promise and magic of a fairy cottage garden.