Beth Chatto's Gardens

Every August my WI group has an outing. Last week we had a lovely trip to Beth Chatto's beautiful gardens. 

The visitor information centre

Beth Chatto OBE was an award-winning plantswoman, author and lecturer. She was born in Good Easter, Essex in June 1923. Her parents were enthusiastic gardeners. She attended Colchester Girls’ High School and trained to be a teacher. In the early 1940's she met fruit farmer Andrew Chatto. Their shared love of plants brought them together and they married in 1943. Andrew's lifelong interest in the origins of plants influenced the development of the Gardens.

In the early 1950s, a close neighbour, Mrs Pamela Underwood, who ran a nursery, encouraged Beth to become involved with flower arranging. They both became founder members of the Colchester Flower Club, the second flower club in Britain. By the late 1950s Beth persuaded her husband to build a house on part of his fruit farm at Elmstead Market. The site, with its slope from dry gravelly soil to a boggy, stream-fed ditch gave her the combination of conditions on which to create what has become one of the most famous and loved gardens in the world.

Her work at the Gardens began in 1960 when she took an overgrown wasteland of brambles, parched gravel and boggy ditches, and transformed it using plants adapted by nature to thrive in different conditions. In 1967, she opened a small nursery called ‘Unusual Plants’. Although she claimed never to have coined the phrase ‘right plant, right place’, this was always the abiding principle of her planting philosophy. The gardens and nursery soon became a place of pilgrimage for keen gardeners. 

In early 1975, she was persuaded to enter a small selection of plants, dug up from the garden, at a Royal Horticultural Society show in London. Unknown to her at the time, one of the judges wanted to have her exhibit disqualified as he felt her native plants rather than cultivars were no more than ‘weeds’. The other judges disagreed and she was awarded an RHS Flora Silver Medal.

The following year came the first of ten successive Chelsea Gold Medals. Her stand was unique at the time with its display of plants for dry and damp areas as they would be seen growing, in contrast to the traditional Chelsea displays with plants shown in visible black pots.

The Gravel Garden, on the site of the old car park, was to become her most famous achievement displaying plants carefully chosen to cope with ultra-dry conditions which have never been watered other than by light Essex rainfall.

In 1978, she wrote her first book, The Dry Garden, and in 1982 The Damp Garden. These were followed by Plant Portraits (1985), Beth Chatto’s Notebook (1988), and The Green Tapestry (1989). In 1998, she collaborated with her close friend, Christopher Lloyd in Dear Friend and Gardener. This was followed by Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden(2000), and Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden (2002). 

In 2002 Beth Chatto was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours, and her most recent honour came in 2014 when she received The John Brookes Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Garden Designers.

Silent Space

Wednesdays and Thursdays between 4pm - 5pm this is a no phones or conversation area,

just a quiet place to relax and connect with nature.

In a gardening career spanning six decades, Beth Chatto’s many awards included ten successive Gold Medals at RHS Chelsea, the RHS’s highest award, the Victoria Medal of Honour, and the RHS Lawrence Medal both in 1987, the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998 from the Garden Writers Guild (now the Garden Media Guild), and two honorary doctorates, from Essex University in 1987, and from Anglia Ruskin University in 2009.

The garden and nursery continue to thrive under the direction of Beth’s granddaughter, Julia Boulton. The Beth Chatto Education Trust was established in 2015 to promote her beliefs and give practical advice to future generations of young gardeners.

We had lunch, then looked around the plants in the nursery area

The shop is quite small with some lovely products, but no preserves. 

∼ Be safe and well ∼ 

Polly x