DOWNTOOLS
BOOK REVIEWS
COTTAGE GARDENS (NATIONAL TRUST)
by Claire Masset
Pavilion Books, £14.99, ISBN 978-1911358923
A picture-book pretty appreciation of an enduringly popular garden style, underpinned with a solid foundation of sensible and knowledgeable advice.
Reviewer Jodie Jones is a garden writer.
Who doesn’t love a cottage garden? Its origins may lie in the harsh, hand-to-mouth reality of our genuinely self-sufficient ancestors, but this bucolic embodiment of the Good Life, where beauty and utility combine to romantic effect, has always had a powerful hold on our national psyche. Over the past few weeks the lure of a simpler and gentler way of life has only got stronger, making now the perfect time for this National Trust publication.
It isn’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last book on the subject, but it is a worthwhile addition to the genre. Author Claire Masset writes well and with the assurance that comes from being an experienced gardener herself. Her National Trust remit gives her the chance to showcase some gorgeous examples, including Hill Top, the Cumbrian farmhouse immortalised in Beatrix Potter’s classic children’s book illustrations, and the garden at Monk’s House in East Sussex that captivated Virginia and Leonard Woolf.
Alongside charming tales of Medieval housewives growing hollyhocks by the house to combat rising damp, and Victorian aristocrats indulging in a fantasy of rural life, is an assessment of Marjory Fish’s modern cottage garden at East Lambrook Manor, and the late Christopher
