WHEN BETH MET DEREK: the gravel garden

The main inspiration for the layout of Beth Chatto’s gravel garden was a dried-up riverbed she saw in New Zealand in 1989. But fresh ideas for its planting came from much closer to home. In June 1990, Chatto made one of her regular visits to stay with Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter. One day, they drove over to Dungeness, 50 minutes across Romney Marsh.

Walking back up the beach, they came across a black-painted cabin. Growing beside it was, as Chatto wrote to a friend, “as fine a plant of santolina as you’d never expect to see in such an arid place, like a great windblown fluffy ball come to rest in the shingle together with curious family groups of weird stones, bits of flotsam and jetsam – of wire and other things… we were led by curiosity round the back of this cottage where we were astonished to see the range of plants, all flourishing among sand and pebbles”.

Moments later, Derek Jarman came out of his home. Having discovered who they were, he invited them into the tiny front room. That evening, he wrote in his diary:

“They were taking notes and photos. I realised quite quickly that I was in the hands of experts. Beth knew the Latin name of every plant, and when she told me who she was I nearly fell off the Ness.”

Chatto was equally amazed that Jarman knew who she was.

That night, she admitted in her diary that she had been affected by the way his plants flourished in that unlikely situation: “We all paint very different canvases, but I had been encouraged by that brief glimpse of his palette to make a gravel garden.”

She was delighted when Jarman sent her a year’s tally of plants growing around Prospect Cottage: sea kale, red and white valerian, sea campion, woody nightshade, Star of Bethlehem, scarlet pimpernel, cinquefoil, hound’s tongue, yellow rocket, hop trefoil, Nottingham catchfly, and many others.

Chatto wrote back bursting with enthusiasm, telling Jarman about her plans for a gravel garden “where last year visitors parked their cars”. She was looking forward to planting it, “inspired in no small way by what you have achieved at Prospect Cottage”.

A year before he died, Jarman visited Chatto, buying plants from her nursery and later sending her seed of a purple oriental poppy she had spotted on the Ness. “The memory of meeting [such] a unique and courageous man has never left me,” she wrote in remembrance. Much as she was herself, she felt he was “sustained by the miracle of growing plants”.

Catherine Horwood is the author of Beth Chatto: A life with plants (Pimpernel Press, £30).

Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum)

Scarlet pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis)

Red valerian (Centranthus ruber)

Woody nightshade (Solanum dulcamara)

Common hound’s-tongue (Cynoglossum officinale)