The quintessential English cottage garden style is not so English at all

What we think of as the quintessential English cottage garden style — mixed herbaceous borders and some pomp and circumstance, and yes, by that we can infer a bit of Elgar and Victoria sponge) — the type of garden praised and replicated across Britain, and adhered to here by a certain type of Irish mindset and the open-garden brigade — is not so English at all.

In fact, it had its germination in the mind of an Irishman. A man born in Co Laois. A man of whom the London Evening News said on the advent of his 95th birthday in 1933 that he: ‘changed the face of England’ — that man was William Robinson, (1838 – 1935).

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a long border, I love an open garden, I especially love cake with cream, but all my life I’ve seen that setup as a displacement of an Irish gardening vernacular, indeed I would go so far as to say I’ve seen it as a sort of cultural genocide and creativity killer.