The Cottage Garden

Through over 700 exquisite photographs and evocative text written by Danish gardening celebrity Claus Dalby, explore the history and development of the beloved cottage garden design style.

In the pages of The Cottage Garden, you’ll first draw inspiration from the stories and landscapes of generations of famous cottage gardeners, including Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, William Robinson, Margery Fish, and Tasha Tudor. Then, meet modern cottage gardeners from around the globe who combine billowing masses of flowers such as poppies, delphinium, lupines, foxgloves, peonies, roses, lilies, and many more to create dreamy landscapes infused with the romance and wildness of cottage-style gardening.

You’ll find no formal lines, rigid rules, or perfect spacing in the cottage garden. Instead, the form is organic and purposefully unstructured. Plants self-sow here and there, bulbs pop up and spread unrestricted, and everything appears casual; though as you’ll come to learn through Dalby’s words, it is all done with great intent.

Overflowing with textures and colors, the cottage gardens featured throughout this book in hundreds of full-color photographs are found in places as diverse as Germany, Sweden, Denmark, England, and the United States. The accompanying text is derived from Dalby’s personal visits to these gardens, along with his intimate interviews with the resident gardeners.

Dalby provides useful details about the design, development, and continued evolution of cottage gardens. He shares the stories of these breathtaking modern cottage gardens in a way that allows you to glean inspiration you can use to create a cottage garden of your own, whether large or small. 

The gardens profiled in these pages exhibit the essential foundational elements and principals of well-designed cottage gardens. Whether home is in the countryside or a suburban subdivision, the profiled gardens will serve as both muse and motivation for the creation of a classic backyard cottage garden in your own space. This gorgeous tome is sure to become the bible of this much-adored classic garden design style.

Also by Claus Dalby: Containers in the Garden