Book review - The Modern Cottage Garden by Greg Loades

In his new book, Greg explores a fusion between the ever-popular cottage garden of roses and foxgloves and the prairie-style planting of designers like Piet Outdolf, with swathes of grasses and late flowering perennials.

Greg begins with an interesting exploration of the two styles before showing us how to combine them in a usable way in our own gardens, covering smaller gardens and containers too.

As a highly experienced gardening writer and editor, Greg is well acquainted with beautiful, successful gardens, such as Jenny Bowden’s glorious garden in Surrey, which he uses as examples to illustrate his ideas.  He explores this new style of planting through the seasons, covering evergreen shrubs, climbers, grasses and herbaceous perennials varieties in more depth as he goes.

There is also a useful list of Greg’s top 50 indispensable plants for a modern cottage garden.  The book combines both aspirational mouth-watering illustrations with really practical advice – a winning combination.

Published by Workman Publishing