Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Redesigning the Old Cottage Garden

The Old Cottage Garden was first laid out in the late nineteenth century. It followed the fashion of the day with a straight, narrow path leading from the little front door to the narrow front gate, all edged with quartz from the goldfields.  Not any more.  

We decided to realign the path.  It had never run at a right angle to the house and it looked, well, it just looked really silly.  And annoying.  And anyway this is now the back of the new house.  So we shifted the path to this new position, orthogonal to the house.  In the photograph above you can still see the line of the old path leading to the old front gate.  No-one has ever used the 'front gate' anyway, so next  week we will block it in and place a seat at the end of the new path to give a satisfying focal point. New gravel on the path and a pair of clipped  silvery Teucrium fruticans  will complete the reworking as shown in the image below.


An added advantage with the new design, so we have been told, is that the feng shui of the house is now much more propitious; health and prosperity will no longer be able to flow from the house but will be contained within.  Sounds good to us.  To see Rick Martin's panoramic photograph of The Old Cottage Garden in the Autumn of 2010 click here

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