English Garden Design Drawings

This particular example of an English garden design is a medium-sized garden (and this is only one part of it) in Canada. It is immaculately maintained and the owner is an enthusiastic gardener living in a very sheltered micro-climate allowing him to grow some wonderful plants well outside their usual hardiness zone.

None of the plants in this picture and drawing are particularly hard to grow or tender so it's easy to replicate this garden area.

Note the use of background shrubs. This was a feature of this garden and there are some fine semi-tender plants (such as the Japanese Maple) in the right hand side.

Also, there are plants in the picture that may not appear in the drawing. I wanted to give you a sense of the major plants; you can add the odd perennial geranium or favorite delphinium (both of which are in this garden) wherever you have open spots.



The other thing worth noting is that this is a mature garden so when you see those huge Phlox paniculata in the background, there are several plants of each color in the clump and the huge clumps are mature. This will take you a few years to replicate and fill in the spaces like this. But starting with more than one of each plant is a great first step.

The drawing below gives you the main plant list used in the above picture. It's not perfect (and neither is my memory) :-) about the non-flowering perennials in the picture. But it should give you a good starting point in your own English garden design.



The point that's worth noting in this classic cottage garden or English garden design is the plants being used are crowded in and they are those the gardener enjoys. So if you pick the plants you enjoy and put lots of them in a design, you're going to get something you can be proud of.

If you like the idea of English garden design, you may find these five rules for cottage garden design of interest