The Best Flowers for a Cottage Garden
There is something magical about a cottage garden overflowing borders, flowers spilling onto pathways, buzzing pollinators, and armfuls of blooms ready for the vase. It's a garden style that feels both effortless and abundant.
At PepperHarrow, cottage gardens hold a special place in our hearts. While the look may seem casual, the most beautiful cottage gardens are thoughtfully planted with flowers that provide fragrance, texture, and blooms throughout the entire growing season.
If you're dreaming of creating your own cottage garden, here are some of our favorite flowers to include and the ones we grow right here in the fields of Madison County.
What Makes a Cottage Garden?
Traditional cottage gardens combine ornamental flowers, herbs, and flowering shrubs in a relaxed, layered design. Rather than neat rows and formal plantings, cottage gardens embrace abundance. Plants intermingle, bloom times overlap, and every corner offers something beautiful to discover.
The cottage garden beds at PepperHarrow in full midsummer bloom.
Star of the Late Summer Garden
Dahlias
Few flowers provide the drama and volume of dahlias. From dinner-plate blooms to delicate ball varieties, dahlias bring months of flowers from midsummer until the first frost and they produce armloads of blooms for bouquets along the way.
Left: Our beloved Café au Lait dahlia. Right: A late-summer armful from the dahlia field.
Fragrance, Beauty & Pollinator Power
Lavender
No cottage garden feels complete without lavender and it's at the heart of everything we do at PepperHarrow. With more than 18,000 plants across 13 acres, we've seen firsthand how lavender anchors a landscape while softening every edge around it.
Plant lavender along pathways where visitors can brush against the blooms and carry that signature scent with them. It pairs beautifully with roses, cosmos, and any soft-toned perennial.
Our lavender fields in bloom the heart of PepperHarrow each June.
Effortless Beauty
Cosmos
Cosmos embody everything we love about cottage gardens. Their delicate, feathery foliage and dancing blooms create movement and softness throughout the landscape. They're incredibly easy to grow from seed and bloom generously for months, drawing butterflies all season long.
Vertical Interest & Early Color
Snapdragons
Snapdragons provide the upright spires that help create the layered look cottage gardens are known for. Blooming in a wide range of shades, they fill the gap between spring and summer flowers and make outstanding bouquet additions one of our most-requested stems at the Des Moines Farmers Market.
A midsummer bouquet from the PepperHarrow cutting gardens.
Classic Cottage Elegance
Delphinium
Few flowers capture the traditional cottage garden aesthetic quite like delphinium. Tall spires of blue, lavender, pink, or white create dramatic focal points and pair beautifully with roses and peonies. They thrive in the cooler temperatures of an Iowa spring and bring a touch of old-world charm to the garden.
A Springtime Showstopper
Peonies
Peonies are beloved for their lush, full blooms and incredible fragrance. Though their season is short, few flowers make a bigger impact in late spring. Their large blossoms pair beautifully with other cottage garden favorites, and they produce some of the most stunning cut flowers you can bring into the home.
Colorful & Productive
Zinnias
If you're looking for flowers that bloom all summer long, zinnias deserve a prominent spot in your garden. They thrive in Iowa's hot summers and reward gardeners with continuous color until frost. We grow Queen Series zinnias here at PepperHarrow for their exceptional stem length and bloom size.
Our Queen Series zinnias and a Madison County sunset that's hard to beat.
Planning for Blooms All Season
The secret to a truly great cottage garden is succession layering flowers with different bloom periods so something beautiful is always happening. Here's how we think about the season at PepperHarrow:
- Peonies
- Sweet Peas
- Delphiniums
- Ranunculus
- Lavender
- Snapdragons
- Delphiniums
- Lisianthus
- Cosmos
- Zinnias
- Dahlias
- Sunflowers
- Dahlias
- Cosmos
- Zinnias
- Amaranth
Fall harvest bouquets from the PepperHarrow fields dahlias, cosmos, and seasonal foliage.
Bringing the Cottage Garden Home
The best cottage gardens aren't perfectly manicured. They're alive with pollinators, overflowing with blooms, and filled with flowers that invite you to slow down and enjoy the season.
Whether you're planting a small border or transforming an entire landscape, incorporating flowers like dahlias, lavender, cosmos, snapdragons, peonies, and zinnias will help you create the romantic, abundant garden you've always imagined. By choosing for succession spring bulbs into summer annuals into fall dahlias your garden stays vibrant from the last frost all the way to the first.
Happy gardening from all of us at PepperHarrow nestled on the bluffs above the Middle River Valley in Winterset, Iowa.
Visit Us at the Farm
Come experience the cottage garden in person. Join us for a workshop, pick your own bouquet, or browse our seasonal lavender products we'd love to see you.
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