Making a garden meant creating "a sense of enlarged freedom" for Frederick Law Olmstead, the 19th-century father of American landscape architecture. Thanks to Olmstead, we have wonderful parklands like New York's Central Park and elegant, spacious suburbs like Chicago's Riverside, but it was also because of Olmstead's ideas that Americans came to think of gardens as necessarily being huge, sweeping spaces filled more with lawns and footpaths than with fruits and herbs and flowers.

Not anymore. As development steadily encroaches on open spaces, making for smaller lots, and older, traditional homes are revived into use, the traditional English cottage garden is enjoying an upsurge in popularity among American gardeners. Vivid, whimsical, hardy, and requiring a minimum of upkeep, the cottage garden suits people with little space and busy lifestyles.

The cottage garden was born in the 12th century, when the plague all but eradicated the English peasantry. In order to create a workforce among the remaining peasants, aristocratic landholders began offering land and cottages in exchange for crops. Although the peasants worked the fields for the aristocrats, what they chose to grow at home, close to the cottage, was what they lived on. Planted in a simple, four-square layout, the cottage garden was used to grow food as well as medicine. Planted in groupings within the squares were vegetables, berries, fruit bushes and trees, grains, herbs, and eventually flowers, making the cottage garden practical as well as aesthetic—a romantic, hodge-podge source of food, healing, and aesthetic beauty. The traditional cottage garden (also called the "four-square") eventually became a lasting hallmark of English culture. As the cottage garden's popularity increased, the garden itself grew too, burgeoning with roses, grasses, shrubs, perennial flowers, and vines that crept over arbors and walls.

The cottage garden eventually caught on throughout the English classes, and throughout Europe. Perhaps the most famous English cottage garden outside England is still that of the painter Claude Monet, in Giverny, France—a stepped and sprawling garden filled with rich colors and complete with lily-pad filled ponds that continues to delight visitors and viewers, since Monet designed, helped cultivate, and painted his garden over and over.

But it was the English Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th-century that won the cottage garden a lasting place in the hearts of gardeners the world over. Its greatest influences were garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), who added herbaceous borders and color groupings to the cottage garden, and Vita Sackville-West, who created an informal, subtly colored profusion of planting within her husband's architectural framework at Sissinghurst Castle in the 1930s. Jekyll published many books on gardening, and her Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) remains in print as the cottage gardener's bible. As an expression of Jekyll's painterly ideas on colour, the book takes the form of an instructive tour of her own garden at her beloved Munstead Wood estate in Surrey. Illustrations of some of Gertrude Jekyll's favourite plants augment full-color interpretations of her planting plans to convey an instant impression of her aims.

But you don't need to travel to England or France to see a stately cottage garden cultivated by a famous creative success. Corgi, Vermont, is the home to Corgi Cottage, a veritable storybook scene created by children's book author and illustrator Tasha Tudor.

There are a few ironies associated with the cottage garden, the first being that the trick to creating a successful cottage garden—that is, one that looks as if it just happened to bloom where and the way it did—is to plan it carefully from the outset. "The cottage garden is all about color, texture, and scent," says Sharon Green, who designs and installs gardens throughout Ulster and Sullivan counties. "It's easy to maintain if you break it down into sections before you plant, and plant for continuous bloom—using spring bulbs, perennial flowers, and perennial grasses and trellises so that the garden looks interesting even in winter."

And, says Green, although a cottage garden will bloom the first year, gardeners should not expect the traditional soft riot of flowers and vines to happen overnight. "In the business, we say that in the first year perennials sleep, in the next year they creep, and in the third year they leap," she says. "You can use large plantings right away, or start small and watch the plants grow big—they tend to be hardier that way. Over time, the plants reseed themselves, and that's when you get that lush cottage garden look."

First step in cottage garden design, says Green, is to take into consideration the site's exposure to the sun and the architecture of the house. "Determine what period the house was built in, and then figure out how the garden can relate to the house's architecture and the landscape," she says. "You can pick up a detail from the house and carry it into the garden. Cottage gardens need a framework—like a fence or trellis or arbor or stonework, and you can relate this to the style of the house so that you feel that the garden really belongs to the house. The cottage garden is really all about sense of place."

But before sitting down with graph paper or poring over Gertrude Jekyll's garden templates, "take a very practical viewpoint," says Green. "Figure out your budget range so that you don't aim entirely out of your own ballpark. Gardens are very emotional things, and you don't want to regret overspending later." If a homeowner puts in his or her own labor and starts a garden mostly from seeds and divided perennials and cuttings from friends, she says, a homeowner can spend as little as $500 to have a garden professionally designed—or as little as $50 for DIY design, plant donations, and planting.

Deciding what to plant is the most enjoyable aspect of creating a cottage garden, Green says. However, along with keeping the aspect of light in the garden site, a gardener should also consider which, if any, local environmental predators can access the garden (like deer, groundhogs, and rabbits) and plant accordingly. (Deer, for instance, don't like daffodils.) And if you'd like to attract butterflies and hummingbirds then select plants with lots of pollen. Also, a gardener should be realistic about how much time he or she can spend in the garden—although Green says most busy people choose cottage gardens.

"From there, you can decide whether you want the garden to be visually colorful, your color scheme, whether you want to use a lot of annuals mixed with the perennials," she says. "You might want to put in vegetables with your flowers and herbs, or just flowers, or even just herbs. I like to use ornamental cabbage and include vegetables for added interest through the fall." Another pleasurable aspect of cottage garden designing is choosing a resting spot and vantagepoint for viewing the garden. "Use a stump, or a bench, or a grouping of lawn chairs," says Green. "Plant in drifts rather than straight rows so that the garden and the resting spot is integrated with the landscape."

The most appealing aspect of the cottage garden, aside from its easy maintenance, is its versatility and ability to reflect the personality of its owner. "Every cottage garden is tailor-maid to the site, the architecture, and above all else, the person who inhabits it," says Green. "You can have a contemporary, sparser garden to match the clean lines of a contemporary house—or not, and go for abundance. You can have a buttery yellow garden; a white, moonlit garden; or a gray garden with lots of Artemisia. You can take your garden as far as your imagination can go. You can play detective, if you have an older house—see what's there by not pulling weeds the first summer and then let the original cottage garden that's fallen to neglect come back. Or plant something out of your childhood. Clients ask me all the time, 'My grandmother had this flower; can we plant it here?'" In the end, says Green, a successful cottage garden should evoke good memories—the ones you keep and the ones you create.

Sharon Green can be contacted at her Liberty-based company, Green Design, at (845) 482-3659 or greendesign@catskill.net. For a list of appropriate flowers and other plants, consult your local chapter of Cornell Cooperative Extension (contact information available at www.cce.cornell.edu/programs/hort/gardening) or visit www.diy.com.