Celebrate exuberant color with the carefree plantings of a cottage garden. While other garden styles often feature formal lines and orderly plantings, cottage gardens revel in colorful chaos and serendipitous plant pairings. The result is relaxed and cheerful, focusing more on the passion of gardening than the rules. But by following certain garden design tenets and practices, your cottage garden can thrive with minimal care.

In the above garden, flowering shrubs, roses, perennials, annuals and spring bulbs ensure colorful blooms from March until late fall. Plants like iris, alliums, echinacea, roses and foxglove add to the classic cottage-style of this colorful garden.

See the following cottage garden ideas, with classic cottage garden plant and flower suggestions, and get started planning your space.

Investing in soil rich in organic matter means you’ll ultimately water and fertilize less, reducing the amount of work your garden requires. Do a soil test to understand what type of soil you have and amend it accordingly. Doing so gives your garden the best chance to thrive as this one has with purple coneflower, daisies, foxglove, black-eyed susans, astilbe and hollyhocks.

Most cottage garden plans feature full- or part-sun locations. In these types of settings, soil benefits from having a mulch layer to reduce moisture evaporation. Consider installing soaker hoses to ensure that plants receive adequate moisture, especially if you live in a drier region. In this southern California garden, the roses get drip irrigation while surrounding plants survive only on winter rain and waste water from a nearby koi pond.

This enchanting garden, though incredibly lush and diverse, is also drought resistant. The plantings are native to the Mediterranean region and California.