If there’s one style of garden I’m particularly partial to, it’s a cottage garden.

As you probably already know, I have a love affair with flowering plants and enjoy visiting gardens and growing my own garden. I love roses and tulips, and daylilies and daffodils. In fact, I can safely say that there aren’t too many flowering plants that I don’t love on some level. Roses and irises, though, are pretty strong favorites…

I love the verdant glory of a beautiful English cottage garden.

I fell in love with cottage gardens a while ago, flipping through pages of magazines showing beautiful views of the gardens partially hidden by the white picket fences surrounded lovely English cottages. I like the lush profusion of beautiful annuals and perennials: bushes, vines, and creeping plants that crowd the walkways and sometimes run amok among the stepping stones. The plants are encouraged to grow and bloom almost as they please within gently defined limits.

So I really enjoyed it when I got to visit my first real cottage garden. It was American–not English–and located somewhere in Missouri, but I had to take photos! The garden was so lush and beautiful, and the roses, especially, were amazing. I’ve been meaning to do something special with these photos for a while now.

This past week, in between all the other things I’ve been trying to get done, I got serious with sorting more of my picture files and ran across these photos for the cottage garden again. And I just had to do something with them.

A fusion of romantic and impressionism art styles with a vivid color palette brought out the blue and purple shadows on the white picket fence and emphasized the deep, lush greens of the foliage while making the flowers pop. My preferred go-to for digital painting for a while now has been to pair a watercolor painting technique with an oil pastel brush. This seems to bring out just the right amount of detail while lending each stroke a translucent softness that knocks the hard edges off.