I’m Julie Quinn and welcome to my gardening blog about a cottage garden in North London.

My style is a jumbled close planting of shrubs and simple perennials with lots of bulbs, self seeders and herbs. I’m aiming for a chaotic abundance of colour, scent and movement.

The front garden in Spring

And this is the back garden

This blog is about how I work on creating this style of garden and what I love about it – what I plant and what I don’t – what has worked and what hasn’t and how we use the space.

Previously

We came in 1988 and the garden looked like this:

the beginning of my making a garden

We were so lucky to inherit a magnolia and an apple tree in the back and a big cherry tree in the front.

front garden in 1988

Sadly the cherry tree died many years ago and we took it out.

We’ve had to put up a few new fences over the years but started out with this one.

I’d previously done nothing more than plant petunias in a window box in a first floor flat.

For a few years we lived with the lawn, conifers, azaleas and rambling roses.

Then in the 1990s I visited East Lambrook Manor in Somerset and fell in love with hardy geraniums, alchemilla and the wild unkempt look of a true cottage garden – I was hooked!