Lovely, lovely, English Garden

What is an English Garden anyway?

I know I like them. I know they're gorgeous. But what makes a garden "English?"

From Wikipedia:
The European "English garden" is characteristically on a smaller scale and more filled with "eye-catchers" than most English landscape gardens: grottoes, temples, tea-houses, belvederes, pavilions, sham ruins, bridges and statues, though the main ingredients of the English garden in England are sweeps of gently rolling ground and water, against a woodland background with clumps of trees and outlier groves.The name— not used in the United Kingdom, where "landscape garden" serves— differentiates it from the formal baroque design of the Garden à la française . One of the best-known English gardens in Europe is the Englischer Garten in Munich.

The dominant style was revised in the early nineteenth century to include more "gardenesque"[17] features, including shrubberies with gravelled walks, tree plantations to satisfy botanical curiosity, and, most notably, the return of flowers, in skirts of sweeping planted beds. This is the version of the landscape garden most imitated in Europe in the nineteenth century. The outer areas of the "home park" of English country houses retain their naturalistic shaping. English gardening since the 1840s has been on a more restricted scale, closer and more allied to the residence.


Sweeping planted beds. Attainable. Lots of flowers. Check. Gravelled walks. Probably not in the backyard, no. Shrubberies. Mm-hmm... Eye-catchers? Does an old red wagon count? A gnome? A little bench? I'll work on it. We don't even have a bird-feeder since the last one I bought, just like the one before it, broke.

Lots to do. But I have spent some more time planning and have discovered the perfect spot to transplant the pathetic looking raspberry bushes. The current inhabitants can then be moved to the other side of the yard.

Until then, some inspiration...

Doesn't this look like a hobbit house?  I absolutely love it.


I guess this counts as an eye-catcher.


Those flowers are trying to escape the bed. I love this look.  So full!


I would LOVE to have a brick wall in our yard. It looks so perfect to have the plants growing down the hill like that.
Lovely, lovely, English Garden.   *sigh*