The English cottage garden danced into July like Jacqueline Kennedy but is dancing out like Little Edie. After a steady decline over the years the time has come to redo it all. Turn Grey Gardens into Camelot. This is how we feel about it.
Gross. But yay! But also, gross.
If your first thought is, NOOOOO, calm down, it’s all staying the same. For the most part. It will still be an English cottage garden with a brick path, apple espaliers, a grass path, a fence (maybe white picket, maybe not) and tons of annuals.
Zinnia, dahlia, amaranth, celosia, hydrangea and all of the garden favourites will stay but I’ll be adding a tree and some evergreens.
The fence, grass, retaining wall, brick path and porch decking will all be redone because they are all decrepit.
With that bit of news, let’s make our way into the floriferous fall garden.
The English Cottage Garden Year 8
I had a hummingbird whiz past my face the other afternoon on its way to the open faced dahlias so my garden is still a tourist attraction for Mother Nature.
As you can imagine it’s a popular spot for lots of things that fly, chew, sting and sometimes bite you.
A La Mode
Peachy/Orange & White formal decorative dahlia with different variegations. One of my favourites.
The drone I use is a DJI Mini 2. At 5 years old it’s archaic by drone standards but it’s fun to use and still works so I’m keeping it.
My sad lawn. Patchy, half dead and an encyclopedia of weeds. It will be replaced with new sod. I looked into everything from pea gravel to mulch to mini clover to replace the sod but nothing will look as good or be less maintenance as lawn.
To picket or not to picket, that is the question I thought I had answered until a few nights ago when I might have changed my mind.
Big Duck Marigold
These AAS seeds were sent to me a few years ago. I’m not a marigold fan but these marigolds are the size of coasters which reminds me of roller coasters which I love, so they have that going for them.
Now that we’re heading into fall I might start feeling a bit warmer towards marigolds and their garish colour, but really the only way I like them cut and arranged, is into a big yellow marigold ball.
The bed edges are scruffy and powdery mildew and other types of death are popping up.
And yet nobody cares. Everyone who walks past at this time of year stops to look at all the things.
I didn’t raise monarchs this year. I normally raise at minimum 10 or so monarchs, some years, many more. This year I kept milkweed around the property for them to lay their eggs on, tipped my hat and wished them well.
The Apple Trees
It’s going to be an applesauce year.
An applesauce year means I’m going to have more apples than I’ll have room to store so I’ll be making applesauce the same way I did in 2023 when I had a big harvest.
In 2016 I planted two tiny espaliered apple trees. The ownership of the apples is disputed. I claim the apples because I paid for, planted, and take care of the trees.
The squirrels claim them because they’re squirrels and f*ck you.
This year, for some reason, I haven’t lost any apples to squirrels. And not just because I protect them with the weird, pyramid shaped, apple condoms.
Over the years, to the delight of curious passersby, I’ve tried different methods to keep the squirrels away from my apples. I’ve tried bagging the apples with netting (gift wrapped apples to the squirrels), using clear deli containers over the fruit (burned the apples like a magnifying glass) and the method you see above, plastic, green tinted, garden cloches. You can see exactly how I apply the green plastic dollar store cloches around the apples 👈 in this post.
The same cloches are available on Amazon US if you don’t have a Dollarama around you. They’re also available on Amazon Canada.
I reuse these plant cloches every year on my apple trees. I staple them over the branch the apple is on and it mainly prevents squirrels from being able to pull the apples off.
This year I left one side of one espalier without any protection. Partly because I didn’t want to go into the basement for more cloches and partly because I wanted to see what happened.
The bareback apples are still going strong with no interference from squirrels.
This means a) the squirrels understand I am in complete control of the apples and have given up, or b) there’s a monster living under my porch that scares them.
The zinnias above are the Unicorn mix from Floret.
The Double Click Mix of cosmos fill in a huge corner of the front yard with cranberry, dark pink and a cosmos so light pink it looks white until you bring it inside.
I said I hadn’t lost any apples to squirrels, but I have lost a couple to wasps. Wasps are at least civilized. They choose one apple, attack it and then they all come to feast on it.
Squirrels on the other hand rip the apple off, roll it out to the street and then run away. They do this until all the apples are gone.
Self Seeding Garden Flowers
These will reseed themselves year after year. The less you disturb the soil in the spring, the more seedlings will appear, which you can then replant wherever you want them.
But even if I’m not careful about disturbing the soil at all, these flowers will still always reappear for me.
Alyssum
Snapdragon
Celosia
Amaranth
Cress
If you want a garden full of entertaining annuals plant some of those and watch it happen.
Cafe Au Lait dahlia with the pale peach petals and Yvonne the brighter one shaped like a water lily.
Below is Black Satin, a dark red dahlia.
I’m not sure what next spring will bring. Whether it’ll be the English Cottage Garden year 9, or does it become The English Cottage Garden 2.0?
UPDATE: It’s not a monster. It’s a raccoon. I am Little Edie.
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