I’m a great believer in tying the garden to the house - to my eye, a tropical paradise sits uneasily in front of a suburban English semi. So, now I have a country farmhouse of my own, I feel duty-bound to surround it with a picture-perfect garden, and have set off on a quest around the country in search of information and inspiration.

The cottage garden, complete with roses round the door, is often perceived as our national style, but it is a look especially well suited to the stone cottages in my part of west Oxfordshire, on the edge of the Cotswolds. We can all picture the scene: the thatched house, nestling in its garden, tucked up in the soft folds of an eiderdown of plants, including rambling roses, hollyhocks and billowing clouds ofAlchemilla mollis.

The style, however, is more than a chocolate-box cliché – indeed, it is increasingly relevant in the 21st century because it is rooted in adaptability.

Friendly, accessible, uncontrived and reassuringly intimate in scale, cottage gardens have the feelgood factor in spades. Yet it took centuries for this familiar image to evolve out of a combination of the practical need to feed a family and the aesthetic impulse to surround oneself with pretty things.

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For hundreds of years, cottagers planted whatever decorative plants they could get hold of around their houses, mixing them with essential edible crops. By the end of the 19th century, the cottage garden of popular imagination was firmly fixed. Artists of the time pandered to middle-class taste with paintings that perpetuated idealised images of rural life. As a child, I was drawn to the bucolic world of Helen Allingham. Even at a young age, I was aware that the plump, pretty peasants in her paintings were less than authentic, but the flowers – climbing roses, hollyhocks, violas – that spill over paths and wend their way over walls and fences in these pictures do ring true.

Though native plants such as foxgloves often feature, many cottage-garden favourites are, in fact, imports: scented Mediterranean stocks, sweet peas from Sicily and love-in-a-mist from North Africa. These and many others were gradually absorbed into our modest domestic gardens, becoming part of the popular palette.

Over time, cottage-garden style moved away from the countryside, spreading to the suburbs and finally the cities. It found champions in some of the great names of British gardening, including William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll and Margery Fish, and was seized on by the upper-middle and working classes alike. What all these gardens share is a typical planting style that is – or appears to be – laissez faire.

Plants are so tightly packed into every space that not an inch of ground can be seen. Self-seeding is not just tolerated, but actively encouraged. There is rarely an obvious formal planting scheme, and restrictive colour-coding is eschewed in favour of random, often clashing colour combinations.

The result is relaxed and lots of fun. Humour flourishes, too, mostly in the extraordinary examples of topiary that are crammed into the smallest front gardens, where they are immaculately clipped and tweaked. Birds, beasts and crenellated castle turrets allowed the estate worker, with a flourish of his shears, simultaneously to emulate and to cock a snook at the boss up in the “big house”.

Cottage gardens have huge appeal for children, too. My youngest daughters adore the interactive, touchy-feely element introduced by snapdragons and lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina). Achieving the look needn’t break the bank, either – good news in these frugal times. Because of the cottage garden’s humble origins, its hallmark is flexibility, so it is better placed than most to survive when times are tough. The key is to be inventive and resourceful.

Plug gaps with colourful annuals grown from the packets of seed given away free with gardening magazines. Trade cuttings and seedlings with your friends. Above all, loosen up, forget about being tasteful and grow lots and lots of lovely stuff. If you’re used to a rarefied palette of carefully chosen and artfully arranged specimens, this style of planting can feel anarchic, but also strangely liberating.

The current craze for grasses would seem alien to the cottage-dwellers of the past, but their lightness, movement and tendency to self-seed make them ideal for the modern cottage garden. Indeed, with climate change upon us, we might do better to replace many of our traditional favourites with more drought-tolerant alternatives. Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’ would fit the bill perfectly, as would many salvias and verbenas. Lavender has long been part of the look, but other plants of Mediterranean origin could become the stalwarts of the future.

The cottage garden of our dreams is invariably bathed in the balmy sunshine of late May or June – but why should north-facing plots miss out on the fun? A mix of plants, including the delicately arching stems of Dicentra spectabilis (bleeding heart), geraniums and hellebores, interplanted with foxgloves and ferns, would achieve the same easy-going style for gardens that get more shade.

Those with small city spaces can also take much from the ethos behind this style of gardening. Whether your patch is deep in the shires or outside a block of flats, the essential ingredients are edibles. Growing your own is on trend, so, rather than sitting on a waiting list for an allotment, make room for a small selection of vegetables among the flowerbeds. Many are as decorative as their flowering companions. Try an edging of curly-leaf parsley and neat lettuces in contrasting colours.

Kale, kohlrabi and carrots are all beautiful in their own way – and, if you plant alliums or chives nearby, you might avoid carrot fly, too. Finally, a good smattering of herbs, and edible flowers such as nasturtiums, will be productive and beautiful – the very essence of the cottage garden.

Rachel de Thame’s Gardeners’ World special on cottage gardens is at 8pm on BBC2 on August 22

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