A small front yard, only 16’ x 18’, on a tiny lot, for a family with young children. We needed a place for the children to play with neighborhood friends, explore small details and use big imaginations, and we wanted a lovely cottage garden, year round.

The solution: a mini-cottage and a mini cottage garden, arranged around an existing cherry tree. The children love digging and sorting the quartz pebbles, navigating the two uneven stump paths, tending the strawberry plants in the window boxes, and looking for monarch eggs on the milkweed. Plantings are easy-care native sages, ceanothus, lupines, penstemons, milkweed, wooly sunflower, and more.