How our garden editor Clare Foster created a cottage garden from scratch in three years

When we moved to our village in Berkshire in November 2017, the garden around our cottage really was a blank canvas. There was not much planting – the back garden had been laid to lawn and the front garden was entirely covered in gravel, while a tall laurel hedge surrounded most of the garden, barricading us in and creating gloomy shade. We had moved in a hurry and I had torn myself away from my previous garden with reluctance, so I knew I had to start making this one immediately. Most people spend time creating the home they want indoors; for me, the house does not feel like home until I have put my stamp on the garden. I needed to sow seeds, get to work planting and surround myself with flowers – to soften the hard edges and to create a place that would make me feel happy.

Within weeks, we had ripped out the laurel hedges at the front and side of the garden, bringing in more light and giving us at least a metre of additional space on each boundary. At the front, we put in a simple picket fence that would allow people to peer into the garden as they walked down the lane and sliced into the gravel with six brick-edged beds. At the back, we added a small kitchen garden with raised beds and a greenhouse, and a large, curving border to counteract the rectangular lawn. The structure completed, I began to plant in spring 2018. It is so exciting to use plants to completely transform a space. The power they have to change a mood or atmosphere, to create a sensory journey or to link the building with its landscape is extraordinary – and even more thrilling is the vast melting pot of different species and varieties to dip into.

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The idea for the front was to have an unstructured, joyous cottage garden with a tumbling mix of bright flowers and soft grasses I could cut from. I wanted things to self-seed in the gravel, so that the garden would almost design itself and, three years on, this is happening just as I planned. Dianthus carthusianorum, Digitalis grandiflora, white centranthrus, ammi, nigella and hollyhocks are making themselves at home, weaving around larger plants within an evergreen framework of domed Teucrium fruticansand Hebe rakaiensis. With a loose and naturalistic garden like this, the crucial thing is to edit: to take out the surplus seedlings along with the weeds, leaving just the right balance of artfully arranged plants.

The back border had a more formal planting plan with a carefully considered seasonal flow. I began the thought process with the evergreen structure, trying to visualise the space in the middle of winter. Two groups of three box plants anchor the border, with three ‘Annabelle’ hydrangeas and two enormous Euphorbia x pasteurii at either end.

Then I added grasses, also prominent in winter: three Stipa gigantea, several gatherings of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ and the odd Molinia caerulea ‘Transparent’. Finally came the plants I really love– from early tulips to the fanfare of asters and cosmos in autumn. I try to bring together plants that have different shapes and textures: the button-like flowers of Scabiosa ochroleuca against the dense clouds of Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’, for example, or the upright spires of Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’ with the billowy plumes of Campanula lactiflora ‘Loddon Anna’.