A Designing Couple's Cottage Garden

The cottage garden created by Caroline and Darryl Riggins in Tucker, Georgia, occupies a large, fairly level suburban lot. Screened from a noisy street by Southern magnolias and other evergreens, the stunning, one-acre garden features many different garden rooms that are cleverly separated by hedges, trees and other plant groupings.

Caroline and Darryl work together as a garden design and installation team. Darryl structured the various garden rooms while Caroline organized plantings of a variety of shrubs and perennials. A beautiful vegetable garden is lodged in containers set in a pattern on a former car turnaround. Caroline has added flowers to the lettuces and other edibles, which are all planted in well-camouflaged black plastic pots.

Across a wide gravel walk is "compost mountain," a small hill that was once a compost heap. The story goes that Caroline and Darryl could not remove the decomposed mound of garden trimmings, so they made a path across the top and planted the sides of the heap.

The various garden rooms all have a story. For example, the rose garden came about when a large tree fell and opened up a patch of sunlight. The "anniversary garden" was built by Darryl on the hottest day of the summer as a gift for his wife. Other areas are a pond and beach (a sandy spot beneath a beech tree for a play on words), a container collection of Japanese maples and a "rust garden," inspired by a large, wire cage that was a piece of salvage.

The Riggins' garden is full of interesting plants, including: