The English Cottage Garden Book Vintage Art Reference Coffee Table

Discover the charm of English gardens with this beautifully illustrated book. Perfect for garden enthusiasts. The English cottage garden is an exquisite celebration of quintessentially English gardens, showing how they tread a fine line between aesthetics and utility, wildness and domestication. In medieval times cottages, far from picturesque, were vital to their cultivator's self sufficiency and were often surrounded by a yard mainly given over to livestock, but with a patch for vegetables and herbs. In the 17th century things began to change, the gentry started to build cottage-style houses and aided by their servants assumed lives of mock-simplicity. Thus the English cottage garden has derived from 2 strands : the subsistence culture of the original cottagers nad the romantic notions of the gentrifiers.