Practical Cottage Gardening for Florida

by Bill Pitts

Cottage gardens are associated with England, but people all over the world use small yards to cultivate vegetables, herbs and flowers. In France this kind of garden is called a potager, and in Spanish-speaking countries it is the huerta. Different climates and cultures produce different styles, but as a general rule, a cottage garden by whatever name should be made up of useful plants suited to the area. Cottage gardens here in Florida are no exception.

Nicki Forde, a busy graphic artist living in historic downtown Leesburg, has created a lovely cottage garden with a truly Florida style, continuing the tradition of the original owners of her home, who began gardening there in the 1890s. Nicki keeps her garden looking great all year, despite long work weeks. Here are some of her secrets to success.

Start with Strong Structure

Much of a cottage garden’s charm lies in its informal, even haphazard appearance, with flowers seeming to flow freely everywhere. But to avoid creating a thicket, a strong design is necessary, especially in Florida where the growing season is long and plants grow extra large.

Nicki created two small flagstone-and-pebble sitting areas, a wide central walkway and ample secondary paths mulched with pine straw. These give visual relief by creating open spaces between dense plantings. They sharpen the definition of beds, making clean lines that are pleasingly softened by flowers spilling over them. Paths and open areas also give easy access for maintenance, harvesting and enjoying plants up close.

The Importance of Evergreens

Most cottage gardens include evergreens of some kind, often a clipped hedge. The use of evergreens is especially important in Florida, where we tend to expect a garden to look lush all year.

Nicki’s garden looks great even during the harshest times, thanks to tough ‘Louis Philippe’ roses, camellias and a Meyer lemon trained into a standard. She doesn’t shun reliable evergreen groundcovers like liriope or African iris either. They may be common, but they look great when most other plants are dormant; a cottage garden should, after all, consist of common, passalong plants.

Rely on True Perennials

We have all seen pretty pictures of cottage gardens made up of sunflowers, cosmos, marigolds and other flashy annuals. Up north such flowers may last the short growing season, but in Florida they generally don’t make it through the summer. They have to be pulled when steamy weather limits choices for replacement.

To avoid long down times and all the work of replanting, Nicki grows mostly true perennials well-adapted to central Florida. These include cupheas, ornamental sweet potatoes, native firebush and especially salvias. ‘Mystic Spires’ and ‘Indigo Spires’ are some of her favorite salvias. All come back after a freeze and look great most of the year. She limits the number of tender tropicals and sticks to those that thrive right up to frost, such as pentas and coleus.

Nicki treats annuals as extras, and prefers those which reseed year after year. Tropical sage, black-eyed Susans, tall sunflowers, alyssum and nasturtiums all self sow among the more-permanent plantings, filling in gaps and creating those bursts of color essential to the cottage look. These annuals need only “editing” — thinning, occasional transplanting and the removal of spent plants.

Forget the Foxgloves

Many of the flowers associated English cottage gardens struggle in Florida. A talented gardener may coax hollyhocks to bloom here, but they will never put on the show they do in cooler climates. It’s less work to choose plants adapted to our conditions, and the garden will look better for it.

Nicki grows China roses rather than English ones, gomphrenas and agapanthus in place of alliums. Rudbeckias are her daisies. Some traditional English cottage plants, such as alyssum and nasturtiums, do well for her in the cool season. The goal is not to imitate the English cottage garden, but to create a cottage “feel” appropriate to Florida.

Easy Edibles

A cottage garden is a place to grow vegetables and herbs as well as flowers, but edibles can be a lot of work. Nicki sticks to the easiest kinds and treats them as ornamentals. Cherry tomatoes share trellises with climbing roses and morning glories. Turnips, fennel and carrots double as foliage plants. Scallions border beds. Nicki’s goal isn’t to feed the family, but to improve the salad, so even vegetable gardening, usually so labor-intensive, remains a relaxed affair.

Limit Experimentation

In the beginning Nicki grew every antique rose she could get a cutting of; many had to be either coddled or replaced. Now Nicki limits experiments to a few plants a season, often new vegetable varieties or annuals. If these fail, as experiments often do, the rest of the garden still looks great.

Nicki advises gardeners to resist the temptation to tear out the lawn all at once. Start small, expand gradually and learn which plants work best for you.

So Just How Much Work is It?

Nicki mulches with several inches of mushroom compost and oak leaves once a year, usually in February. She feeds the garden once a month or so with fish emulsion or a home-brewed alfalfa tea. She doesn’t spray pesticides or herbicides, and she rarely irrigates. Mulching and dense plantings keep weeding to a minimum. Most of the work involves “editing” self-sown annuals, deadheading, pruning and post-freeze clean up.

The adage that a garden is less work than a lawn is often untrue. So much depends on what sort of lawn, and, especially, what sort of garden. But with a practical approach like Nicki’s, the labor involved is reasonable and the results more than justify the effort.

Bill Pitts lives and gardens in DeLand.

© 2011 Bill Pitts. Originally published in Florida Gardening, Apr/May 2011. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.