The romantic ideal and lush planting style of cottage gardens, combined with the rustic charm of features made out of recycled materials, has beguiled successive generations of gardeners. Making your own cottage garden allows you to give full rein to your creativity, especially if you give things a contemporary twist.

This article offers some hints on creating your own idyllic cottage garden, whether it's the whole of your garden, or just one section.

• The original cottage gardeners did not have a lot of leisure time, nor money to buy paving materials for features such as patios. If you want to have a patio, make it out of a mixture of materials laid in a random pattern for a more authentic look. Use recycled or salvaged materials to achieve an instant worn look.
• Riven slabs look convincingly like stone - lay in a random pattern.
• Bricks - use basketweave or herringbone bonds.
• Tiles - use terracotta or concrete look-alikes.
• Consider using broken pieces of old paving slabs laid with thymes and gravel in the joints, rather than mortar.
• Originally, paths may have been little more than well trampled soil with cinders and odd bits of stone. Repeat the materials used for your patio.
• Real cottage gardens did not waste valuable crop space with lawns. Large borders enabled enough food to be grown amongst ornamentals to help feed the gardener and their family. However, if you can't bear to be without a lawn, make sure it fits into the cottage garden picture - leave grass a little longer and allow daisies to remain. If you have space, go for a wild flower meadow look, with minimal mowing control from you.
• Arches were used to support climbing plants; try to make them look as rustic as possible. Use unstripped rustic treated posts for real authenticity, or machine rounded timbers for a contemporary twist.
• Recycled beams and timbers can be a good find for your cottage garden, too. Make your own simple arches, panels for dividing areas, border edges and plant supports out of woven willow or dogwoods, or buy these ready made.
• Choose garden seats and other furniture in rustic looking timber, or make your own simple items.
• Water features didn't appear in the original cottage gardens, apart from naturally occurring duck ponds, animal troughs and water butts. Make water features look as though they are useful, such as pools to dip watering cans in, for example.
• The original cottage gardeners would have had a real muckheap, with food scraps going to family pigs. Make compost bins look like bee hives, and cordon off utility areas using hurdles.
• Accessories were not something original cottage gardeners had time or money to worry about. Style grew out of necessity, things put to use for functions other than their original ones. Try using:
• half barrels, terracotta pots or old crockery for planted containers,
• old baskets to cover plastic pots,
• scarecrows and forcing pots as border features.
• True cottage gardens included a high proportion of herbaceous plants, which were not low maintenance and did not provide year round interest. Incorporate the following ideas in your cottage garden, to create the essence of cottage style:
• Grow fruit and vegetable crops amongst your ornamental plants, for example, runner beans, blackberries, apples, salad crops or ruby chard.
• Pack plants close together - cottage gardeners did this to maximise space. It also helps to keep down weeds.
• Include low growing plants at the front of borders to grow over the edge of paving and hide edges.
• Grow climbing and scrambling plants through hedges, shrubs and trees. Clematis Viticella is a good choice for this. Climbing roses and honeysuckles can revitalise a dead tree stump, or fruit tree which is past its prime.
• Plant topiary shapes or make your own for true individuality, use faster growing plants for quick results.