The Cottage Garden by Claus Dalby

Through over 700 exquisite photographs and evocative text written by Danish gardening celebrity Claus Dalby, explore the history and development of the beloved cottage garden design style. In the pages of The Cottage Garden, you’ll first draw inspiration from the stories and landscapes of generations of famous cottage gardeners, including Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, William Robinson, Margery Fish, and Tasha Tudor. Then, meet modern cottage gardeners from around the globe who combine billowing masses of flowers such as poppies, delphinium, lupines, foxgloves, peonies, roses, lilies, and many more to create dreamy landscapes infused with the romance and wildness of cottage-style gardening. You’ll find no formal lines, rigid rules, or perfect spacing in the cottage garden. Instead, the form is organic and purposefully unstructured. Plants self-sow here and there, bulbs pop up and spread unrestricted, and everything appears casual; though as you’ll come to learn through Dalby’s words, it is all done with great intent. Overflowing with textures and colors, the cottage gardens featured throughout this book in hundreds of full-color photographs are found in places as diverse as Germany, Sweden, Denmark, England, and the United States. The accompanying text is derived from Dalby’s personal visits to these gardens, along with his Read more

From the Publisher I rang the bell, and the door was opened by a charming older English gentleman. I explained that I was a garden photographer and author working on a book about cottage gardens. Would it be OK if I took some pictures? Both the garden and house are extremely well maintained. The thatched roof is largely new. There are still quite a few thatched houses in England. It is a tradition cherished by the English—which is fortunate, as it’s part of the DNA of these old buildings. A beautiful garden in southern Sweden.