Chatto: Gardening legacy that goes beyond aesthetics

‘Her credo was powerfully simple: Study the light, soil and moisture conditions of a given site, and then assemble plants that hail from such an environment. Aesthetics were still paramount, but the beauty moved far beyond flowers or leaf variegation and into the realms of forms and textures, light and movement.’

I once found myself sitting across a patio table from Beth Chatto. It was hot and sunny – not the weather you normally associate with England – and Chatto was telling me how she came to create her famous garden.

I was so wrapped up in the tale that I didn’t stop to think how many times she had told it. Such was her passion for her life’s work and her eagerness to spread the word that she patiently recounted her history to me as if for the first time.

Chatto used her garden and nursery in the village of Elmstead Market, about 70 miles east of London, as a laboratory and showroom for her horticultural theories. She was extraordinarily prescient and influential, and today’s defining ecological ethic in gardening – healing the planet, sheltering wildlife – draws a direct line to her life’s work.

This summer, gardeners from around the world plan to gather at a nearby university campus to celebrate Chatto’s role in contemporary horticulture.

The symposium at the

University of Essex was organized for late August to mark her 95th birthday but now must go ahead without her. She died May

13, leaving those who knew her, and those who knew her only through her work, reflecting on her remarkable legacy.

“She was one of the most influential plants people of the last half-century,” said Andi Pettis, director of horticulture for the High Line in New York and one of the symposium’s speakers. “Increasingly, we are expecting more than beauty and aesthetics out of our landscapes.”

The plant lovers among us have learned what Chatto discovered decades ago, that naturalistic gardens – welcoming to unusual varieties and reliant on the foliage effects of perennials and grasses – offer the richest palette of plants, the longest season of display and the deepest gardening experiences.

She opened a small nursery named Unusual Plants in 1967 and the following decade blew away the English gardening establishment with a succession of medal-winning displays at the Chelsea Flower Show with species plants that at first had been derided as “weeds.”

Her credo was powerfully simple: Study the light, soil and moisture conditions of a given site, and then assemble plants that hail from such an environment. Aesthetics were still paramount, but the beauty moved far beyond flowers or leaf variegation and into the realms of forms and textures, light and movement.

In her focus on ecology, Chatto brought a German sensibility to notions of plantsmanship but with an English flair for plant artistry.

Matching plants to their site may seem obvious, but other than general parameters of sun or shade, the gardens of her contemporaries were driven by purely ornamental considerations.

In a way, she reinvented the idea of the garden. Just as she realigned plant selection to match a site, she adjusted our view of what constituted beauty.

“I remember her so clearly stressing that a flower is a bonus, it’s fleeting; the flower does not make the garden,” said Janet Draper, a Smithsonian horticulturist who interned in Chatto’s nursery in the 1980s.

Draper is responsible for the Ripley Garden, the horticulturally rich garden between the Arts and Industries Building and the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall. Her plant designs, she said, are directly influenced by Chatto’s teachings.

A number of factors drove Chatto’s ideas. As a young woman, she befriended the artist Cedric Morris. Morris was an accomplished gardener and plant breeder who raised flowers to paint. Chatto was also an expert flower arranger who used wildflowers with great artistry.

But her biggest influence was her husband, Andrew Chatto, a fruit grower with an interest in plant ecology. They built a house on a part of the farm unfit for cultivation. The site was marked by dry gravel slopes and a soggy, spring-fed ditch. As part of its transformation into a garden, she built a dam and created a series of small lakes.