This is a beautiful, helpful and inspirational book that’s brimming with good advice and gorgeous photos of the author’s own cottage gardens. Hubbard focuses especially on how to create a cottage garden with our changing weather and challenges from climate change, giving excellent advice on plants and strategies to address issues like wildfire risks, drought and heavy rains.

I appreciated that she focuses on sustainable gardening in terms of materials used (no more peat moss, for instance) and practices (no pesticides and practices like planting nasturtiums next to cabbages so the cabbage moth caterpillars eat those instead). I also appreciated that she recommends incorporating native plants.

She has all kinds of additional content too, from plans for children’s gardens to suggested plants for sensory gardens and so much more. Tons of photos accompany every bit of it so you can see examples of all of her tips and plans. She is also just imminently likable, and it was like getting a garden tour and a heap of wisdom from a friendly neighbor.

I personally love cottage gardens and my own gardens are a mix of native gardens and cottage gardens. I am definitely focusing primarily on native plants these days though, and would have liked to see more encouragement there. Some native plants are not as frilly and pretty as those classic English flowers, but they are often important food sources for pollinators and for the caterpillars that birds rely on to feed their young.

Hubbard‘s gardens are also far too neat and labor intensive for me, as well. That’s another reason I love my native flowers— they are used to thriving on their own without watering, fertilizer and special care. I leave the dried seedheads to feed the birds over the winter and sow their own seeds for next year, the dried stalks for overwintering bees, and so on. Hubbard says to rake up the fall leaves and go over them with the lawnmower a few times for sustainable mulch, but fireflies overwinter in those leaves and I’ve often found cecropia cocoons in our leafy areas, which next summer will split open to present the colorful, palm sized moths that are the largest in North America.

Those small comments aside, I do love the book and heartily recommend it.

I read a temporary digital copy of this book online for the purpose of review.

I absolutely LOVED this!!! Thank you so so much for approving my wish!!

I’ve always struggled with my not green thumb, but this book was so incredibly informative, I feel like I can go into the next growing season properly and with enough knowledge that my backyard will actually be beautiful and cottagey!