A small courtyard behind a Victorian terrace or a Georgian townhouse can feel more like a holding pen for bins than a garden. Yet these enclosed spaces, with their warm brick walls and shelter from wind, are ideally suited to the cottage garden look — the trick is to think vertically and to treat every pot as a planting opportunity.

Work Out What Your Courtyard Gives You

Before buying a single plant, spend a day watching the light. A courtyard facing south or west will bake in summer and hold heat into the evening, which suits lavender, rosemary, salvias and most roses. A north-facing yard is cooler, damper and shadier, but it will happily grow ferns, hellebores, hostas in pots and climbing hydrangea.

Note also where the walls meet the ground. Rain shadows are common: the first 30cm or so against a wall often stays bone dry however much it rains, so anything planted there needs watering by hand for its first two seasons. Shelter is the other gift. A courtyard may be a full hardiness zone warmer than an exposed suburban garden, which means you can gamble on slightly tender plants.

Let the Walls Do the Heavy Lifting

In a space four metres square, the walls are your biggest growing area. Fix horizontal wires to the brickwork using vine eyes, spacing them about 40cm apart, and run them through the mortar joints rather than drilling into the face of old bricks. Where the masonry is delicate or listed, free-standing obelisks and tripods in large pots achieve much the same effect without touching the building.

• Climbing roses — 'New Dawn' for soft pink repeats, 'Gertrude Jekyll' for scent. Tie in shoots horizontally to encourage flowers along the whole stem.
• Honeysuckle — Lonicera periclymenum 'Serotina' flowers into autumn and perfumes the whole yard at dusk.
• Jasmine — Jasminum officinale for a warm, sunny wall; it needs tying in but rewards you from July onwards.
• Clematis — group 3 types such as 'Étoile Violette' can be cut to the ground each February, which keeps them manageable in tight spaces.
• Star jasmine — Trachelospermum jasminoides is evergreen and glossy, but only in a sheltered, sunny corner.

Keep climbers clear of windows and gutters, and give them a generous root run — a 45cm pot is the minimum for a rose.

Pots: Buy Fewer, Bigger

The commonest mistake in a courtyard is a scattering of small pots. They dry out, look fussy and give plants nowhere to root. Choose the largest containers your space will take — 40cm across or more — and group them so they shade one another's compost. Terracotta looks right against old brick, but only buy frost-proof Italian or Turkish pots, or the first hard winter will crack them.

Use a loam-based compost such as John Innes No. 3 for shrubs and perennials, and a peat-free multipurpose mixed with grit for annuals. Raise every pot on feet so water drains freely, and top-dress with gravel to slow evaporation. In high summer, a large pot may need watering daily; a simple drip line on a timer takes the guilt out of a weekend away.

Compact Perennials That Earn Their Space

Cottage gardening is really about generosity of flower on a modest scale. These clump-forming perennials give months of colour without rampaging:

• Hardy geraniums — 'Rozanne' flowers from June to October; G. macrorrhizum copes with dry shade.
• Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna' — deep violet spires, loved by bees, cut back after the first flush for a second.
• Astrantia and geum — cottagey, unfussy, happy in partial shade.
• Alchemilla mollis — frothy lime-green, seeds gently between paving without becoming a nuisance.
• Hellebores — for flowers from January, when nothing else dares.

Add self-seeders — foxgloves, nigella, calendula and aquilegia — and let them find their own places. That relaxed, half-planned look is exactly what distinguishes a cottage garden from a bedding scheme.

The Spaces In Between

If you have any bare ground at all, gravel over a weed-suppressing membrane will look soft and period-appropriate, and allows thymes, oreganos and erigeron to seed about. Where paving is fixed, plant rosemary, lavender or a compact thyme in the gaps, or simply place pots at the corners to break up hard lines.

A small water butt, a stone birdbath or a weathered bench will anchor the space. A mirror on a shady wall bounces light beautifully, and a few warm-white solar lights among the foliage will make the courtyard usable after dark.

Keeping It Going Through the Year

Feed pots fortnightly from April to August, deadhead religiously, and cut back spent perennials in stages rather than all at once so seedheads stand for the birds. In autumn, mulch with well-rotted manure, tuck tulip bulbs into the tops of pots for spring, and leave the odd stem standing for overwintering insects. By February the hellebores and snowdrops will be up, and the whole cycle begins again — in a space no bigger than a dining table.