Hedging and hedges – cottage garden hedging

Cottage gardens are full of detail, and can look a bit of a mess. One way of controlling the impression of randomness is to create hedges which either:

1. Offer contrast with whatever is on either side of the path, or
2. give a structural outline that helps give the garden coherence.

A favourite feature in this year’s Chelsea Flower show was box balls, box plants cut into spheres on the top of denuded stems that were anything from six inches to three feet tall. Because these are evergreen they offer year round interest and they can be grown in pots which means you can move them around the garden – framing an archway one month, lining a path the next, to bring attention to the key features in the garden at that time.

For hedging choices, consider Forsythia which offers a wonderful spring-flowering hedge like a sheet of yellow. They can be very fast growing, so you’ll need to trim them into conical shapes or a bank after flowering each year to keep them looking tidy. For the ideal cottage garden look, make sure you cut arches so you can see through into the next garden ‘room’. If yellow is not for you, and you don’t want a hedge that screens one part of a garden from another, the cottage garden favourite is lavender which makes a fragrant, evergreen, dwarf hedge which can be clipped or allowed to spill gently over the path for a more relaxed effect – you can interplant them with Santolina (cotton lavender) if you don’t want a solid coloured hedge. Trim the plants lightly each year in late summer as soon as the flowers have faded so that they don’t become bare and woody.

Hedge gardening forsythia photograph by clearly ambiguous, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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