As we anticipate the new series of Gardeners’ World, Monty Don reveals why big changes are afoot in Longmeadow’s Cottage Garden this year
The Cottage Garden has evolved through a number of changes from when we first began to make the garden at Longmeadow in the spring of 1993. By then I had planned the layout of the whole garden, which meant I could start planting hedges and trees, but the role and function of the spaces or mini-gardens that this created was – and to a certain extent still is – fluid. So the Cottage Garden was intended to be a play lawn for the children, who were then toddlers.
However, when the tractor I hired ploughed the first furrow I saw that the soil here was wonderfully rich and structured and would be wasted on a mere lawn. I decided then and there to make it our vegetable garden. The first thing that I planted was box hedging flanking the path running across the garden to the Jewel Garden (which spent its first few years as the play lawn for the children until that too got dug up – but that is another story). I also added an avenue of espaliered pear trees and these provided the main structure of this area. It remained the veg garden for nearly 20 years and the superb soil got better and better with tons of compost added to it every year.
Then, after we had started to film Gardeners‘ World at Longmeadow, I began to add more fruit and flowers so it became an informal, traditional cottage garden with a mixture of edible and decorative plants. After filming a series on French gardens in 2012 I added half a dozen very French roses – such as ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’ and ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’. These were the first of an ever-increasing rose collection in this area and by 2015 the last of the vegetables had gravitated up to the end of the garden and more and more roses were taking their place.
I added thousands of tulips and alliums, we encouraged the spread of the myosotis, and aquilegias, dicentra, hardy geraniums and foxgloves seeded themselves and spread freely. The box hedging that edged all the eight small, square central beds was eventually removed because of blight, but it looked great… only until mid-July. Then the roses gradually ceased performing, the spring flowers had done their stuff, and as the years progressed I realised that it was just not looking great in late summer and, not surprisingly, we found that
