Cottage garden History

Cottage gardens, which emerge in Elizabethan times, come into view to have originated as a local source for herbs and fruits. One history is that they arose out of the Black Death of the 1340s, when the death of so many laborers made land available for small cottages with personal gardens.

According to the late nineteenth-century legend of origin, these gardens were originally created by the workers that lived in the cottages of the villages, to provide them with food and herbs, with flowers planted in for decoration. Helen Leach analyzes the past origin of the romanticized cottage garden, subjecting the garden style to rigorous historical analysis, along with the ornamental potager and the herb garden. She completed that their origins were less in workingmen’s gardens in the nineteenth century and more in the leisured classes’ discovery of simple hardy plants, in part through the writings of John Claudius Loudon.