Page "Cottage garden" Paragraph 5

Cottage gardens, which emerged in Elizabethan times, appear to have originated as a local source for herbs and fruits.

One theory is that they arose out of the Black Death of the 1340s, when the death of so many laborers made land available for small cottages with personal gardens.

According to the late 19th-century legend of origin, these gardens were originally created by the workers that lived in the cottages of the villages, to provide them with food and herbs, with flowers planted in for decoration.

Helen Leach analysed the historical origins of the romanticised cottage garden, subjecting the garden style to rigorous historical analysis, along with the ornamental potager and the herb garden.

She concluded that their origins were less in workingmen's gardens in the 19th century and more in the leisured classes ' discovery of simple hardy plants, in part through the writings of John Claudius Loudon.

Loudon helped to design the estate at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, where farm workers were provided with cottages that had architectural quality set in a small garden — about an acre — where they could grow food and keep pigs and chickens.