A quiet almanac for British gardeners.

The Cottage Plot is a month-by-month guide to planting a traditional UK cottage garden alongside a small raised vegetable bed. It's written for the gardener who wants to know the next sensible thing to do — without wading through a whole encyclopaedia.

The advice assumes a temperate climate roughly equivalent to USDA zone 8 / UK zones 7–9 — frost from late October to mid-April in most regions. Northern gardeners may want to add two weeks; southern coastal gardeners may shave a fortnight off.

The cottage column leans on the classics: roses, hollyhocks, foxgloves, lavender, sweet peas, dahlias. The vegetable column assumes one or two raised beds worked intensively with succession sowing.

Read it slowly. Garden slowly. The seasons are in no hurry.