After decades of drawing inspiration from English gardens, renowned Australian landscape designer Paul Bangay finds a cottage garden of his own to reinvent in the Cotswolds. It’s a story of reimagining boundaries and axes, planting hedges and perennials, experimenting with structure and softness, and discovering, season by season, what thrives, what falters and what surprises.
— A peek inside the pages of Diary of an English Garden by Paul Bangay
Summer at Garth Cottage is a period of mild and anticipated warmth. Withering bulbs are rapidly replaced with the foliage and flowers of herbaceous perennials in a deliberate and admired succession.
I look forward to fullness of the garden beds and the height that the macleaya and eupatorium provide to the rear of the garden. Roses thrive, preferring early summer to late spring in the cold folds of our valley. The ‘Rambling Rector’ rose I particularly love wanders over the potting shed, bringing life to the dullness of the grey slate roof.
It’s a season of rapid change as we watch the early flowering Alchemilla mollis and Salvia caradonna replaced by the verbenas, persicarias, acteas and gaura. The terraced hill comes to life with its layers of Mediterranean-inspired plantings of lavender, catmint and stachys. Most of all we appreciate the mildness that allows us to eat, drink and relax on the terrace, immersed in the garden.
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Diary of an English Garden by Paul Bangay
Diary of an English Garden by Paul Bangay, Thames & Hudson
