How do you create a romantic cottage garden – with all the charm you would expect – while also facing the realities of hot summers and limited water? Landscape designer Ashley James shows us how careful planting can deliver beauty that stands up to the elements.
The garden at Red Hill Cottage, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, came with two design challenges. The first was obvious: a steep, sloping site reliant on tank water. The second was more subtle – creating something both restrained and flower-filled to satisfy the two homeowners’ very different leanings.
Landscape designer Ashley James, known for his “romantic cottage gardens”, was brought in to try and strike a balance between the pair. One half of the couple already knew and loved Ashley’s work, and leaned into the floral vision. The other was more hesitant, unsure a garden filled with perennials would hold up in the region’s hot, dry summers, especially given the tank water situation. Ashley’s brief was to create something floral and immersive to suit both the architecture and the elements.
The home – a modern farmhouse – had already begun to shape the site. The new build sat neatly into the contours of the land. Ashley’s job was to frame it with foliage.
Creating softness & structure
From the road, a custom timber gate opens to a wide gravel drive. The approach was deliberately designed. An entry sequence leads you down through the garden in stages. Corten steel manages the levels, forming curved retaining walls and a central staircase. At the base, a landing of reclaimed brick provides warmth and contrast to the home’s sharp lines.
The planting is brimming but considered. Hardy perennials are mixed with grasses and small shrubs chosen for movement, texture and form. Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ and Miscanthus sinensis bring height, while salvia, Euphorbia and lavender add colour and softness.
In shadier pockets, hydrangeas and Ligularia reniformis thrive – a little indulgence in an otherwise pragmatic and drought-tolerant palette. Water was always part of the equation. With the whole site running on tank supply, every plant had to prove its worthiness.
It’s not strictly a cottage garden, but it shares the same essence: softness, colour and seasonality. In summer, it moves and blooms. In winter, the structure still holds.
Beyond the garden, the wider landscape takes over. The borrowed view of open farmland with cattle in the distance deliberately blurs the edge between garden and countryside.
A realised vision
Though it’s only months since the last plants went in, the garden already feels bedded in. It’s partly thanks to the hardscaping of the steel and bricks, and also the density of planting.
And what about the initial scepticism of what was possible in this garden? Ashley was thanked, with beaming smiles, for a garden the owners never thought possible. Living proof that romantic planting can also be resilient. That softness doesn’t mean fragile, and a garden can feel gentle without being precious.
Plant palette
- Achillea millefolium (yarrow)
- Agastache aurantiaca ‘Sweet Lili’
- Agastache hybrida ‘Poquito Orange’
- Agastache mexicana ‘Forever Summer’ (Mexican giant hyssop)
- Echinacea purpurea
- Echinacea purpurea ‘Wild Berry’
- Erigeron karvinskianus (Mexican daisy)
- Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii
- Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Blushing Bride’
- Lavandula angustifolia (English lavender)
- Ligularia reniformis (tractor seat plant)
- Perovskia atriplicifolia (Russian sage)
- Salvia hybrida ‘Mystic Spires’
- Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’
- Stachys byzantina (lamb’s ear)
- Verbena bonariensis
Grasses
- Calamagrostis × acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ (feather reed grass)
- Miscanthus sinensis
Trees
- Betula pendula ‘Moss White’ (silver birch)
- Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’
