An English Cottage Garden in midsummer is a place to bring delight and find peace and joy in the ‘still dews of quietness’ of a garden. In the words of Gertrude Jekyll – a place ‘to call home over-wearied spirits‘. Join me in our garden.

What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that it’s fresh young beauty will ever fade? For my own part, I wander up into the woods and say “June is here-June is here; Thank God for lovely June!“

Gertrude Jekyll – The Making of a Garden

English Cottage Gardens

Pass through these trees and you are soon surrounded by an artist’s palette of flowers relaxing in a lazy stillness.  This is nature’s slow lane. You can’t rush here. The garden laughs and sings in summer joy. This is a little earthly paradise, my own Eden.

Among the things made by man, nothing is prettier than an English cottage garden, and they often teach lessons that great gardeners should learn.

William Robinson  The English Flower Garden 1883 

As in any cottage garden, this is a place of playful profusion, a heady colour mix of flowers, softened by feathery grasses. Here you’re immersed in the garden, becoming part of it. Later in the summer this path. may become impassable, and you will find it difficult to avoid treading on flowers that flop over the path. The hum of insects and the waft of scent seems to reflect the fullness of mid-summer’s garden here.

In the front roadside verge we have sown this small hay meadow. In May it was full of oxeye daisies. Now wispy meadow grasses sway graciously in the breeze. The meadow looks after itself before being cut down to set its seed as a hay crop in July/August. 

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.”

Gertrude  Jekyll. The Making of a Garden

Peace and Joy in a Summer Garden

In our back garden there are trees giving welcome shade and a wildlife pond. There is also this restful corner soothed by the cool of refreshing ferns and foliage. A cottage garden also needs its vegetables. We have some here. For the traditional ‘cottager’ they were the mainstay.

Paradise Gardens

.  The whole garden is singing a hymn of praise and thankfulness….every tree and plant is full of new life and abounding  gladness; and to feel one’s own thankfulness of heart and that it is good to live,  and all the more good to live in a garden.

Gertrude Jekyll  The Making of a Garden

A garden is for ‘the purest of all human pleasures’, one of our Creator’s good gifts. Where better to be on a sunny day in midsummer than in your own peaceful garden. Somewhere to dream dreams and enjoy an earthly foretaste of the Paradise to come.

Rosemary Verey of Barnsley House in Gloucestershire had this quotation on a plaque in her garden:

  “As no man be very  miserable that is master of a garden here,  so will no man ever be happy who is not sure of a garden hereafter.    Where the first Adam fell, the second (Jesus) rose.”

John Evelyn

As a believer in Jesus I can be sure of a ‘garden hereafter’ where “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22: 2). What a wonderful prospect.

Wishing you plenty of delight and pleasure in your own and in other people’s gardens this summer.

Thank you for visiting.