The Cottage Garden (DK Living) - Softcover

Lloyd, Christopher; Bird, Richard

4.11

131 ratings by Goodreads

9780751307023: The Cottage Garden (DK Living)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0751307025 ISBN 13: 9780751307023

Publisher: DK, 1999

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Whatever the size and situation of your plot you can learn how to create and cultimave an idyllic cottage garden one of the best-loved and most enduring gardening styles. Tracing the development of the cottage garden from the humble vegetable patch to the lush flower garden Christopher Lloyd and Richard Bird analyse what defines a cottage garden - a working garden that is as productive as it is charming. Full-colour plans show how to utilize and organise the space available whether creating a decorative flower garden with pinks and delphiniums or a full working garden with soft fruits rotation crops and livestock. Easy-to-follow advice explains how structural featues such as paths fences arbours and ponds are best combined with flowers vegetables hedges and trees.

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Review:

For many people, the English cottage garden is a small, and emotionally charged, glimpse of heaven. Intimate, informal, colourful, romantically luxuriant, it also seems to embody a tradition of timeless simplicity and self-sufficiency--a kind of naive art. Christopher Lloyd and Richard Bird also point out in The Cottage Garden that the cottage flower garden tended historically to be a low-maintenance enterprise: by necessity, since the exigencies of rural labouring life allowed little leisure for its cultivation. The flowers planted would have to be able to look after themselves, the vegetable garden claim most of the time available.

The Cottage Garden is a comprehensive manual for the creation of this idyll, whether it be solely devoted to flowers, or a full working garden with soft fruits, rotation crops, bees, a pig, ducks and chickens. Plans are given for different garden layouts, with information on the best plants to choose, their cultivation and flowering or fruiting seasons. There is much sound advice on the features which add to the character of the cottage garden: gates, walls, hedges and fences, paths, ponds and pergolas. If your dream is to create such a garden, "a tidy mess" as the authors call it, The Cottage Garden makes an ideal starting point. --Robin Davidson

Synopsis:

Covering both basic and more advanced information , this book on the cottage garden includes a clear explanation of the subject, equipment and preparation. Detailed step-by-step photographs and instructions take the reader systematically through all the techniques.

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