Cottage Garden, Spring Bluff
The food producing garden has long been derided as the ornamental garden’s poor cousin. Unsophisticated, grubby, homespun, and even uncouth is how productive gardens have been perceived. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the big manor houses of Britain and Europe hid the productive areas of the garden behind high walls, taking an out of sight, out of mind approach to what was considered to be a blot on the landscape.
Behind the fortress like walls was secret world of activity and fruitfulness. Gardeners would come and go, using service roads and living in bothies well detached from the “big house”. Dung heaps were made within the walls and wells dug for irrigation. Crude glasshouses were built and heated by a furnace. Productive gardens, necessary as they were for the provision of food, spoiled the Arcadian style of garden being created by the era’s artist gardeners.
During other periods of history, and within the confines of a different social class, distinctions between utility and ornamentation didn’t exist. In Medieval England, yeoman farmers (a kind of emerging middle class) were able to hold title to an acre or two of their own where they could grow food and keep livestock for their own use. These smallholdings usually included a pig, beehives, chickens, vegetable beds, and flowers. Apple and pear trees were grown to make cider and perry, while herbs were planted for their medicinal, rather than culinary value. Flowering plants were included to fill gaps, attract pollinators and to look pretty. Similar gardens were created by Australia’s early settlers.
It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that cottage gardens were created purely for ornament. Gardeners like William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll were espousing a wilder, more romantic style of gardening, and the traditional cottage garden was cleaned up for a more up market demographic. The vulgar, productive bits like livestock and vegetable beds were hidden, the pretty bits like flowers championed as an ideal vision of naturalistic gardening. The functional yeoman’s cottage garden became the pleasure garden, and the schism between utility and ornament became firmly entrenched.
Funnily enough, the schism broke down to some extent during the Great Depression and the post war era of the 1950’s and 60’s. In those days, almost every backyard had a lemon tree, a vegie patch, some flower beds and a passionfruit vine climbing over the outdoor thunderbox. Food was again grown out of necessity. There was no pretence or overstatement, just an innocent, happy jumble that most of us now look back on with a sense of nostalgia.
So what am I getting at? I’m calling for nothing less than a rediscovery of the traditional cottage garden, albeit one more in concept than direct imitation. If you live in a Queenslander, it should come as no surprise that a relaxed, informal garden filled with flowers and fruit will fit like a well worn pair of boots. If you live in a rendered, Tuscan inspired house, a Mediterranean inspired garden that combines formal ornamentation and utility will work beautifully.
Whichever direction you take, we have to realise that in a carbon constrained, energy depleted future, virtually every household will need to grow at least some of it’s own food, just like the yeoman farmers of old. Don’t get sucked into thinking that productive gardens can’t be beautiful, or that they can’t work in tandem with ornamental gardens. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Rather, like the black and white keys on a piano (I can hear a cheesy Stevie Wonder/Paul McCartney duet coming on), utility and beauty should be considered two aspects of a single entity. Could the authentic cottage garden be re-imagined as the defining style of the 21st century garden? We’ll just have to wait and see.
First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 7th February 2009
