How to Choose the Right Plants for a Cottage Garden (Without the Extra Work!)

Most people think building a cottage garden is just about choosing beautiful plants, but that's actually why so many cottage gardens end up feeling overwhelming, messy, or way more work than expected. Because not all plants behave the same, and not all of them belong in your garden. Hi, I'm Stacey with Bricks and Blooms, and I garden in Zone 6B in New Jersey. I've lived here all of my life, Jersey girl through and through, and I've been gardening for about 30 years now. I'm coming up on my 30-year anniversary pretty soon, actually. It's kind of crazy how time passes like that. But anyway, over time, I've learned that creating a full-layered cottage garden isn't about planting more. It's about choosing the right plants for your space, your climate, and how you actually want to garden. So today I want to walk you through how to decide what really belongs in your cottage garden. Okay, so before we even think about the plants, we need to start with how you want your garden to function. Do you want something that's a little maintenance, that mostly takes care of itself, or are you okay putting a little bit more time into specific plants? Because cottage gardens can look effortless, but behind the scenes, some plants are a little more work than others. So a really good example would be foxgloves. I love them. I love them in my cottage gardens, but for the life of me, I cannot get these to return without starting them from seed every year, and so I make that decision to do that. Now, there are some years where I might say, eh, I'm not really feeling it, whatever, and I just go with that. But if I really want foxgloves in my garden, I have to take that extra step to get them there, because when I've bought them at the nursery before as transplants, they just haven't done well. And so being upfront and honest with yourself about what you want and the amount of work that you're willing to do changes everything. One of the biggest mistakes I see is choosing plants just for how they look when they're in bloom. But you know what? A cottage garden is about the whole entire season, not just a blip in the season. So you want plants that have good foliage after blooming, they hold their shape, and continue to add structure to the garden. Because if everything disappears or flops after flowering, that's when gardens start to look awkward. And this is why I gravitate to plants like sedum autumn joy, shrub roses, nepeta, salvia, hydrangeas, zinnias, dahlias, and ornamental grasses. Now let's talk about those classic cottage garden plants. Foxgloves, delphiniums, hollyhocks, lupins, they're so beautiful, and they absolutely belong in cottage gardens, but they don't perform the same in every garden. As I just mentioned before, foxgloves are tough for me to get to establish here. Same goes for lupins, hollyhocks I haven't really had a whole lot of luck with, delphiniums, you know, I've planted them out and then they've petered out and I haven't really seen them return. This year I'm actually trying them as young transplants and seeing how they do. Gardening is an experience, right? And so if something doesn't work one way, try it another way. But that's the way I have to grow these plants in order to include them in my cottage garden. So if a plant isn't performing to expectations or they're a little bit more work, think through other ways of how you can start them, how you can grow them, and see if that changes for you. But seriously, if a plant doesn't perform well, we have to rethink whether we want it in our gardens to begin with, and is there another plant that we can substitute for it that's a little bit easier? So instead of forcing them to work, it's totally okay to adjust how we grow them or how we include them in the garden. And this is where your plant choices shift from what looks good to what actually works. Instead of focusing on specific plants, it helps to think in roles. Every cottage garden needs structure plants, filler plants, and seasonal interest. So instead of saying, I need fox loves, you might think, I need something tall for the back, or I need something to fill in the middle, or I need something that keeps blooming after spring. That shift in the mindset makes designing so much easier. Now, another big shift is choosing repetition over variety. It's so tempting to plant one of everything because we just want to grow everything, like I get it. My former garden, I had half an acre and I tried to squeeze every single plant I could come across just so I could grow it. But at times the garden looked a little haphazard and messy, and it's because it lacked that repetition. Cottage gardens actually look so much better when you repeat plants throughout the space. That repetition creates cohesion, makes the garden feel fuller, and is often much easier to maintain. Now, if your goal is a low maintenance garden, this is where plant choices matter most. Some plants require staking, constant deadheading, and replanting every year, and that adds up quickly in terms of your time. So I like to rely on more dependable plants like coneflowers, nepeta, salvia, agastache, coreopsis, rubeccia, sedums, and hardy hivescus. These come back year after year and fill in naturally with ease. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I have expansive gardens here. There's a lot of beds, and I can't possibly spend every waking hour staking, deadheading, and doing all the things just to get the look that I want. So I 1000% absolutely do rely on easy care, low maintenance plants that just don't require a lot from me, that get me the look without the work. Now, that's not to say that I don't also have plants that do, but I really do think through what is going where and how much work I want to do before I start planting. One of the most important parts of building a cottage garden is paying attention. Every year, your garden shows you what thrives, what struggles, what spreads, and what completely disappears. And the more you pay attention to that, the easier your garden becomes over time. If you want help putting this into practice, my book walks through cottage garden design with ready-made layouts that you can easily follow, and many of them are deer-resistant as well. And one of the biggest tools that's helped me improve my garden year after year is my flower garden planner. It helps you track what you planted, what bloomed, what worked, and what didn't. So you're not starting from scratch every single season. I also put together a full guide on how to choose the best plans for your cottage garden, and I'll link that in the description below. I hope you got a lot from this video today. And if you want more ideas on creating a full, low-maintenance garden, make sure you hit that notification button and subscribe to my channel. And that's all I have for you today. I'll see you in the next video. Enjoy a beautiful day.