The English cottage garden is an exquisite celebration of quintesentially English gardens, showing how they tread a fine line between aesthetics and utility, wildness and domestication. In medieval times cottages, far from picturesque, were vital to their cultivator's self sufficiency and were often surrounded by a yard mainly given over to livestock, but with a patch for vegetables and herbs. In the 17th century things began to change, the gentry started to build cottage-style houses and aided by their servants assumedd lives of mock-simplicity. Thus the English cottage garden has derived from 2 strands : the subsistence culture of the original cottagers nad the romantic notions of the gentrifiers.