The distinguished plantswoman Beth Chatto OBE VMH (nee Betty Diana Little, 1923-2018), one of the most influential horticulturists of the post-war era, was born in the village of Good Easter, Essex, and educated at Colchester County High School. Her parents were keen gardeners and her love of gardening came from them, though she never studied at horticultural college. Instead, from 1940 to 1943, she trained as a teacher at Hockerill Teacher Training College, Bishop’s Stortford, exercising her gardening skills by growing vegetables for the school in its grounds.
In 1943 Beth married Andrew Chatto (1909-99), the grandson of the founder of the publishers Chatto and Windus, with whom she had become acquainted when making an ecological survey of local salt marshes. It was Andrew's abiding interest in plant ecology that ultimately set Beth on course for her own successful career, with her planting philosophy being very much a joint effort. Andrew’s curiosity in plant associations began as a child when, for his American mother's health, his family went to live in California. Observing ‘Eschscholzia’ (Californian Poppy), ‘Ceanothus’ (Californian lilac) and lupins growing wild, which he recognised from his parent’s garden in Radlett, Hertfordshire, Andrew wondered how they had got there from England. On being told that they were native to California as brambles and elderflowers were to England, he subsequently developed a lifelong interest in the origins and natural associations of garden plants, discovering with which species they grow and the conditions to which they were adapted. Garden reference books, at the time, said very little about where plants came from, or their habitat, so Andrew combed through journals and scholarly works to garner this information. He read scientific literature in German and French and, in order to be able to read the extensive material on the plant life of the Soviet Union, he learned Russian. After deciding upon a career in farming, Andrew studied agriculture at Wye College, Kent, before taking over a 100 acre (40.5ha) fruit farm his parents had bought for him at Elmstead Market, Essex.
In the early years of their marriage, with the couple living at Andrew's family home in Braiswick, Colchester, Beth devoted herself to bringing up their two daughters and helping her husband on the farm. In her spare time she tended the garden inherited from her mother-in-law and read profusely about gardening, particularly the writings of Vita Sackville-West and Margery Fish. In the early 1950s, a close neighbour, Mrs Pamela Underwood, who also ran a nursery, encouraged Beth to become involved in flower arranging, where she discovered that it was possible to create attractive designs with foliage as well as flowers. The two women subsequently founded the Colchester Flower Club, only the second such club to be established in Britain. At around the same time the Chattos became friends with the artist and master plantsman Sir Cedric Morris (1889-1982), who had developed a garden of rare plants at his home and art school in Benton End, Suffolk. He introduced Beth and Andrew to many plants they were both interested in, such as bergenias and pulmonarias among others, marking the beginnings of an interest in the more unusual, and often neglected, perennials suitable for both dry and damp situations. Sir Cedric subsequently became a second generous mentor to Beth, supplying her with drought-tolerant plants, of which many were found in the wild as he travelled and painted in the Mediterranean away from the cold East Anglian winters. Beth also taught herself to propagate from the seeds, berries and cuttings that Sir Cedric gave her, as well as from his generous bundles of roots, tubers and bulbs.
By the late 1950s, after pouring considerable effort into her Braiswick garden, battling with chalky boulder clay but still being far removed from the ideal that Beth admired at Benton End, Sir Cedric told her that she would never make a good garden there and would have to move. Although uprooting the family would be hard, Andrew and Beth recognised that Sir Cedric was right and decided that several acres of unproductive farmland on their fruit farm - comprising drought-stricken gravel leading down through dense, damp, silty soil into a spring-fed hollow in which lay a narrow ditch - would be the ideal place to create a garden informed by Andrew’s years of studying plant ecology.
In 1959 the Chattos commissioned a split-level bungalow, White House Barn, from their architect-friend Bryan Thomas, as their new family home. Once they had bulldozed away banks of blackthorn and bramble, leaving only a few mature oak trees as features, the couple found themselves with a site totally unsuitable for conventional gardening, asking for a series of designs using plants adapted by nature to different problem areas. As well as becoming a trial ground and showcase for Beth’s philosophy of using plants adapted to, and in harmony with, local conditions, or to put it more simply the right plant for the right place, Beth also took plant placement beyond the practical, using her florist's eye for contrasts in colour, form and texture. This was informed by her knowledge of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, where scalene (asymmetrical) triangles are used to create outlines with simple lines that are dynamic yet balanced and harmonious at the same time. Beth thus grouped her plants in a similar fashion, often with several interlocking triangles, with core plants forming a back bone, ensuring that there was height and shade even in winter, while vertical plants were used to create an apex. Bushier plants were used for the middle layer while spreading plants formed the base. Her overall emphasis was on texture and contrasting form, as well as variations in foliage colour. Beth also placed considerable importance on the use of trees to lead the eye upwards, which she called "painting the sky".
During the early 1960s the site began to take shape, with the first area of gravelly soil on which the couple set to work being the Mediterranean Garden, where several terraces and raised beds were created immediately to the south of the house. In the shallow depression between the house and the site's south-west boundary, the spring-fed ditch was widened to create a pond to form the basis of the Water Garden. It was dug in 1959-1960 with equipment borrowed from a neighbouring farmer who was excavating the first of a series of reservoirs on adjoining land. However, as little was done to improve the heavy clay soil, the planned planting scheme never materialised and the pond was remodelled in 1965 when a further two ponds were added. A fourth pond followed in 1973. To the south-west of the ponds, the existing boundary line of trees, mainly ancient oaks and holly bushes, was added to from 1967 with conifers and a mixture of evergreen and deciduous shrubs and then underplanted with a collection of shade tolerant plants to create the Long Shady Walk.
In the mid-1960s, with Andrew's health failing and the future of fruit farming looking uncertain, the couple sold off the farm, leaving them with the house and garden. To support the family, and also having gained sufficient confidence in her horticultural abilities, Beth opened her own nursery, called 'Unusual Plants', adjacent to the garden, in 1967. As a result of travelling around the country demonstrating flower arrangements using only flowers, foliage, seed heads and grasses from her garden, Beth found the audience that she needed to buy her plants and a successful business was born.
In January 1975 Beth’s first exhibit at a Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Westminster Flower Show, displaying her ‘unusual plants’, resulted in the award of a Silver Medal. However, it as for her RHS Chelsea Flower Show displays in the 1970s and 1980s that she became well-known, winning 10 consecutive Gold Medals from 1977. Lecturing tours of Canada, the United States, Australia and Europe followed and her first book, ‘The Dry Garden’, was published in 1978, followed by ‘The Damp Garden’ in 1982 (revised in 1998). Her books disseminated her ideas to a wider market and she became widely acclaimed, attracting a huge following among aspiring gardeners at a time when only a few German and Dutch nurserymen and designers were beginning to preach a naturalism based on the sustainability of plant communities.
In 1976, when the adjoining farmer extended his reservoir (which had originally been created by the Chattos in 1953), the excavated clay that had been left at the bottom of the gravel slope was flattened and topped with newly excavated clay, which was subsequently mulched, to create the Reservoir Garden. It was originally designed as an area of wide grassy walks with three, large, informal island beds planted with low maintenance trees and shrubs, interspersed with a few herbaceous perennials and grasses. However, as the soil structure proved to be problematic, being wet and sticky all winter and dry and rock hard in summer, it was redesigned from 2014 as a single, large bed, being reopened by Beth on her 94th birthday in 2017.
Prior to a storm in 1987, Andrew and Beth has intended to leave a wooded area at the eastern end of their site, mostly oaks, alder and willows, as natural woodland, to allow it to develop into a home for native flora and fauna. However, after clearing up the storm damage, Andrew agreed that Beth should turn it into a new garden, the Woodland Garden. Covering about 1.5 acres, planting started in 1990, with an understorey of mixed deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs and a ground layer of shade-loving plants from temperate world countries.
In 1991, with the success of the garden and nursery resulting in the creation of a larger visitor car park, Beth converted the original car park into an arid gravel garden. Born out of the summer droughts of the mid-1970s, it was planted as an horticultural experiment, to see which plants could thrive in drought conditions without supplementary watering. Designed to evoke a dried-up river bed, planting here commenced in Spring 1992.
In 1999, in order to display smaller, low-growing Alpine plants that enjoy well-drained sunny areas, yet can be easily overgrown by larger plants as in the Gravel Garden, Beth developed the Scree Garden adjacent to the house, on part of the Mediterranean Garden.
Working with a team of gardeners, Beth continued to oversee the development of the site until her death on 13 May 2018. As one of the most well-known and respected post-war horticulturists, she was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society’s Victoria Medal of Honour, its highest accolade, in 1988 and the Garden Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. In 2002 she was awarded an OBE for her services to horticulture, and in 2014 she won the John Brookes Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Garden Designers (SGD), an award granted to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the landscape and garden design profession. Further recognition from the SGD came in 2019 when they announced the introduction of the Beth Chatto Eco Award, which will be awarded on an annual basis to a project where the design focus is on the garden’s environmental impact through the creative and ecological use of materials and planting.
The Beth Chatto Gardens and her gardening ethos continues through the work of the Beth Chatto Education Trust, established in 2014 to carry forward her passion for plants and ecological approach to gardening.