In a time of stylish garden decor and accessorized outdoor living spaces, a true cottage garden is a lovely thing to find.

Such is the garden that wraps itself around the front and side of the Mount Hope home of Caroline Smith and her husband, Gibbs.

This is not a garden of daubs or splashes of colour, but great swaths and masses of sunshine yellow, deep purple and vivid blue, soft pinks and rosy red, set in and against a hundred hues of green.

It is also a garden that reflects the history of the couple's two families. Gibbs is the last of a family that settled and once owned a large part of what is now Mount Hope. The house was built in 1985 on ancestral land, and the garden was started about 10 years later.

Caroline introduced her own history into the garden through the plants, in particular a lovely yellow evening primrose from her mother's garden that has distinct rust-red tones around the unopened buds. She has found many others in the gardens of friends and family in the area, which she values because the plants are conditioned to the soil and local climate.

A lovely old rose, Blanc Double de Coubert, is trained upright into a pink column in early summer. The garden also has false blue indigo (baptisia australis) and wild prairie indigo (b. leucanthus), field milkweed (a giant plant that Caroline sometimes has to yank out but loves for the butterflies it attracts), veronica (her favourite plant) and wild rose. There's also lavender and Midnight Blue sage, lamb's ears (both upright Helen von Stein and the prostrate Silver Carpet varieties), sweetgrass and liatris, purple coneflower and mums, valerian and borage.

Hundreds more species and varieties that have been planted are kept in an inventory and "there are just about 250 varieties of shrubs, trees and plants."

They planted every tree, and there are dozens, many of them now at mature height. She uses a lot of native plants because they don't need a lot of attention. Watering is minimal, once a plant is established.

With this many plants, a gardener could easily lose control of it, with plants spreading madly into each other's spaces. A cottage garden, by its nature, looks natural and unrestrained but Smith says there's an art to it.

"When you make a garden like this, you really, really have to know your plants. You have to know what to take out, as well as what to plant, because stuff will try to take over."

Smith estimates she puts in about 100 hours in the garden from late April to May.

"You have to be focused when you have this much space to garden. You have to make notes, plan what you're going to do and when. Otherwise you get distracted and nothing gets done."

She mulches to control weeds and keep moisture in the soil, but she doesn't amend the soil with manure or triple-mix. "It's clay here, and the plants like it. It's not a good idea to undo the clay. It holds the moisture."

If she had her way, it would be nothing but woody plants and perennials. "I hate annuals, to be honest. I have some in pots for the look, but they're expensive and they need watering, and the rest of this garden doesn't."

Rob Howard lives and gardens in Hamilton. gardenwriter@gmail.com