We Were Asked to Choose a Book....

and each of us have responded with a response from our readings.  The Library at Woodlawn was the source for our books and I chose a book about the Cottage Gardens. We have been working today to restructure the "cottage gardens" at Jubilee Farm.  The pictures below say it all: love the plants you work with and don't be afraid  to shape them and the landscape they inhabit. 

Here I am with Tina reshaping the eponymous by the pool. 

In my readings I learned that the Cottage Garden has a rural charm and can be used in town, city or country. Its ambience  looks like an orderly chaos unplanned and overgrown; you will need to shape it if you like order (see pictures below). You have in the cottage garden more different types of flowers than in a conventional garden. Colors are mixed and many cottage gardens consider water in the form of pumps or ponds. 

Here is the euonymous Tina and I pruned. 

 Flowers are at the front of cottage gardens and vegetables, too, if you know how to incorporate them. Traditional cottage gardens have wild and fruiting trees; whatever you love in the garden, structure it so you get many different effects with the plants you love. For example, structure  areas for tall plants, formal hedges, rustic fencing, climbers or fruit trees. A garden is so much more interesting to walk around if it has a theme. A traditional cottage garden feature is to use edging materials to outline paths with low-growing plants to invite you in to an area.

Arches, garden seats, arbours, gravel or brick paths give the garden a typically rural deal.  Arches are ideal features for linking different parts of the garden, and different sorts of climbing plants like roses and clematis look pretty over an arch. Seats situated at the end of a walk, or in a niche in the hedge also look enticing and beautiful.

Today we also painted the front stoop of the Jubilee Farm house. This is where our friends, Maggie O'Brien and Jim Grube, live. We repaired the wood steps, leveled them, reset them into the brick walkway, and here we are finishing the painting with a few patches to go. 

--- Lisa Neundlinger, 2018 Slack Farms Austrian Intern