“I love the natural feel of the gardens”

Head Gardener Åsa Gregers-Warg shares her insights behind the scenes

Swedish-born Åsa has been head gardener at Beth Chatto’s gardens for almost seven years. Her team includes a garden supervisor and two trainees together with local volunteer gardeners.

How did you come to work at Beth Chatto’s gardens? I trained and worked for a couple of years in Sweden before moving here – partly because of the climate. It’s a lot warmer here than Sweden and the growing season is much longer. Britain is also the gardening country to go to; there’s such a great culture of gardening here. I’d read Beth’s books and articles in garden magazines, so I was really keen to work in a garden with a very natural feel to it. I really liked her ‘right plant, right place’ philosophy so you work with nature and what you’ve got, rather than trying to force plants to be happy in a place where they wouldn’t be. This type of garden isn’t common in Sweden and although they’re open to the public, the gardens remained Beth’s private space.

What are the garden highlights in June and July? It depends on the weather because sometimes plants flower earlier, but generally there’ll be bearded irises, oriental poppies, verbascums and cistus in the Gravel Garden. The Water Garden is surrounded by the lush growth of gunneras, hostas, persicarias, astilbes and astrantias while white foxgloves and geraniums flower in the Woodland Garden.

So what are your main summer jobs? There’s always lots of weeding, deadheading and cutting back plants that have finished flowering, such as Geranium endressii. We cut these plants back so that hopefully we’ll get a second f lush of f lowers. The ponds tend to need quite a bit of maintenance at this time of year to keep the blanket weed under control. There’s grass cutting too and we’ll start collecting seeds from early-flowering plants.

Are you undertaking any major development projects? The Reservoir Garden has undergone the most recent changes. We started replanting last April and finished in June. It still needs a bit of tweaking and more plants adding, though. There are also seven or eight smaller areas in other parts of the garden that we’re working on this year. These aren’t big projects – just borders that have started to look tired. The garden was started in 1960, so it needs rejuvenating in places, but it’s hard because we’re open all year round and we don’t want the garden to look like a building site.

What do you see as Beth’s main gardening legacy? Beth stepped back from planning the garden several years ago, but she was still involved right to the end. Her main legacy will be the gardens themselves, plus her books and other writings which have tremendous inf luence right round the world.