Why cottage landscapes are all about edges

What if the defining feature of a Highlands landscape is the edge?

We sit here in the Land Between, that biodiverse strip at the very south of the Canadian Shield. It’s one big edge where rock meets lowlands.

Zoom in on our homes and cottages, and you see more edges. There’s the edge between the clear land and the forest, and between the shore and the lake. Edges everywhere.

The Land Between is many kilometres wide, and the edges around our cottages are no thin green line either. But we tend to treat them like that.

When the lawn runs down to the lake, that’s a line, not an edge. When the forest suddenly ends by your driveway, that too is a line, not an edge. It’s a bit like someone used a cookie cutter to carve out the land for your cottage. The lines are clean, but they’re not natural.

What if we allowed more dirty edges instead?

The most Highlands way to landscape is to enhance the edges, changing them from lines to fuzzy gradients. That means a continuous flow from shoreline plants to open ground, to woodland plants, to forest. Your cottage then becomes part of the landscape, rather than sitting on a separate stage.

Blurred lines

Think about your shoreline. We know how important natural shorelines are for lake health. What “natural” means in this context is a gradient, an edge.

It starts with the water-loving plants already in the lake and then moves inland to where the ground stays saturated, where Cardinal Flower, Joe Pye Weed, Swamp Milkweed, and sedges thrive. And then further up where the soil drains more, there are maybe some shrubs: Winterberry with its red berries in the fall and Red Osier Dogwood with its glorious stems in winter.

By the time you’ve reached the open ground, you’ve passed through four plant communities. No lines, just edges.

The result is that water doesn’t suddenly end; it fades into the land. That means your cottage sits within a landscape that has its own direction rather than being separate from it. The landscape has its own story, and there’s flow from your deck all the way to the lake.

Walk towards the trees, and the same thing happens. A forest edge isn’t just a row of trunks; it’s a step down.

Maybe you’ve planted your open ground first with some prairie grasses like Little Bluestem, and some wildflowers like asters, goldenrods, and coneflowers.

Then, as you get closer to the forest, shrubs appear. A serviceberry, some dogwoods – shrubs with loose and layered forms. Further into the forest are shade-loving understory trees such as Pagoda Dogwood and Hobblebush.

As you stand at the cottage, instead of a forest that looks like a fence, you see layers receding into the trees. This makes the cottage feel right—the artificial abrupt transitions are gone, replaced by graduated edges that feel natural.

Ecologists call these transitions ecotones. And it’s likely there are more species in these zones than in any other habitat alone. There’s a simple explanation for that: species from both adjacent habitats overlap at the boundary, and edge specialist species show up too. It’s like getting three communities for the price of two.

An attractive landscape and a biodiverse landscape are one and the same. Instead of a lawn which is static from month to month, a layered edge changes through the day and across the seasons. Grasses sway. Leaves change colour. And birds and butterflies fly between the branches and stems. It seems more alive because it’s more interesting to look at. And something more alive feels better to be in.

So let’s embrace life on the edge. We’re not looking for wild, just a softening of the hard lines. We’re looking for flow, and your home becomes part of it all.