Cottage garden Evolution

The “naturalness” of casual design began to be notice and developed by the British leisured class. Alexander Pope was an early promoter of less formal gardens, calling in a 1713 article for gardens with the “amiable simplicity of unadorned nature”. Other writers in the 18th century who positive less formal and more usual gardens included, Joseph Addison and Lord Shaftesbury. The evolution of cottage gardens can be follow in the issue of The Cottage Gardener (1848-61), edited by George William Johnson, where the emphasis is squarely on the “florist’s flowers”, carnations and auriculas in fancy varieties that were originally cultivated as a highly-competitive blue-collar hobby.

William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll help to famous less formal gardens in their many books and magazine articles. Robinson’s The Wild Garden, available in 1870, contains in the first edition an essay on “The Garden of British Wild Flowers”, which was eliminated from later editions.