Beth Chatto
Garden designer, plantswoman and writer who saw horticultural problems as opportunities
BETH CHATTO, who has died aged 94, was the acknowledged queen of English horticulture, revered for her extensive knowledge of plants, her writing and, above all, her expertise in gardening in the most inhospitable conditions, exemplified in the Beth Chatto Gardens at Elmstead Market, Essex.
Sprightly and elegant, but with nothing of the grande dame about her, Beth Chatto was an inspiration to the professional plantsman and amateur gardener alike. Her gardening was entirely self-taught and based on the principle of working in harmony with nature (a concept known nowadays as “ecological gardening”), informed by her husband Andrew’s hobby of researching the natural habitats of garden plants. To these basic rules of plantsmanship she added an instinctive designer’s eye for line, texture and form, inspired by techniques of Japanese planting and flower arranging.
Characteristic of Beth Chatto’s approach was her skill in grouping foliage plants – a striking feature, not only of her own garden, but also of her stands at Chelsea, where, from 1977, she won Gold Medals ten years in succession.
Applying the skills of the flower arranger, her displays were notable for asymmetrical triangular patterns of ascending size and bulk, which relied heavily on leaves and striking shapes to create tapestries of texture and hue. Flowers, though important, were always a secondary consideration, and she confessed to preferring spring and autumn, finding the colourful profusion of summer flowers “sometimes too much”.
Beth Chatto refused to accept the concept of problem areas and her message to amateur gardeners struggling with poor soils or atrocious weather conditions was one of excitement and discovery. She took the view that there is no soil or position that cannot sustain its own special flora, and no garden “problem” that cannot be reinvented as an opportunity: “You can grow almost anything provided you respect the conditions the plant prefers and you provide it with a good depth of humus”, she wrote. “And it’s no good being impatient.”
The Beth Chatto Gardens were a vivid demonstration of her theories. Her husband had farmed fruit around the site for 18 years before they built a house there and started the garden in the early 1960s. She famously described the site as a “muddy ditch” lying in a dip between two farms, the top south-facing slopes being thin gravel, and the bottom, muddy silt. The weather conditions alone – low rainfall with long periods of drought, high summer temperatures and a biting northerly wind in winter – would have had most gardeners throwing in the trowel. The site had been neglected as useless for agriculture and was choked with brambles, holly and bracken.
From this unpromising material she created a garden which made a virtue out of adversity, adapting her planting to the conditions she found. The garden evolved into three distinct areas – the sun-baked gravel slopes became a Mediterranean garden, devoted to drought-resistant plants; below, the ditch was dammed, forming five large ponds which provided the spine of the garden, fringed with water-loving plants. Beyond, she created a woodland garden, filled with shade-loving hostas, rare primulas, hellebores, astilbe and pulmonaria.
The result was a harmonious blend of glades and vistas, with hundreds of species of rare plants, which looked as interesting in winter as in summer. Soil, she admitted, was her obsession, and she improved it constantly by digging in plenty of leaf mould, manure and compost.
One of the things that most endeared Beth Chatto to her readers was that she was a working gardener – as familiar with weeding, preparing the ground and ripping out mistakes as they were. Though she somehow always contrived to look elegant – even in gumboots and gardening gloves (which she wore to protect her skin against the allergy which she had to many plants) – she was definitely not the lady of the manor telling others where to plant while contenting herself with a little genteel pruning.
As a writer, Beth Chatto combined no-nonsense practical advice and highly readable accounts of her own gardening adventures and misadventures, with vivid descriptions which brought her plants to life on the page. Linarias had buds “looking exactly like little budgerigars”; Tanacetum (Amanum) had leaves “so finely cut, they look like woolly curled feathers”. Apart from her books, readers of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph Magazines will recall her delightful series of Plant Portraits, Gardening Guides and Gardening Ideas published, variously, in the 1980s and early 1990s.
She was born Beth Little at Colchester, Essex, on June 27 1923 and educated at Colchester County High School. Her parents were keen gardeners and her love of gardening came from them, though it never occurred to her to study at horticultural college. Instead, she trained to be a teacher at Hockerill Teachers’ Training College. She began work in the war and exercised her gardening skills by growing vegetables for the school in its grounds.
In 1943 she married Andrew Chatto, the grandson of the founder of the publishers Chatto and Windus. He was a fruit farmer at Elmstead Market in Essex, though he lived at the family home in Colchester.
In the early years of their marriage, Beth Chatto devoted herself to bringing up their two daughters, helping her husband on the farm and tending the garden – which was large, but fairly conventional. In her spare time, while her husband busied himself compiling, for his own pleasure, a panorama of the natural habitats of garden plants, she read books about gardening and flower arranging and became interested in Japanese design. She founded the Colchester Flower Club and became a sought-after lecturer on flowers and flower arranging. Her earliest prizes were for floral arrangements.
In the early 1950s she met the artist-gardener Sir Cedric Morris, who gave her cuttings and seeds from the rare plants in his garden at Benton End, Suffolk. It was Morris who suggested she should find a new site for her energies on the ground that she would never be able to make a good garden where she was living in Colchester, both because the garden was already established, and because of its chalky boulder-clay soil.
In 1960 the Chattos decided to leave Colchester and build a house on the land they farmed for fruit. At that point they had no thought of starting a nursery garden; they continued to farm, and built up their garden for their own pleasure.
The decision to change what had been a private garden into a business was one which was forced upon Beth Chatto. Not long after they moved into their new home, Andrew Chatto became ill and it was obvious the fruit farm would have to be sold. Tentatively, she began to propagate and sell plants in a small way, placing advertisements for “unusual plants” in specialist magazines and local newsagents, but response was slow.
In 1967 the farm was sold and the “unusual plants” business became the family’s only source of income. Beth Chatto became the sole breadwinner, responsible for running the garden and newlyestablished nursery, maintaining the house and sorting out all the finances. She came near to cracking under the strain and at one point needed medical help, but she eventually pulled through.
Over the next 10 years she slowly built up her nursery, developing a mail order side, although it was not until the late 1970s that the business became really successful. In the mid 1970s she began exhibiting at the RHS fortnightly shows; at the second show she attended she won a Silver Medal. In 1976 she exhibited at Chelsea for the first time and the following year won her first Chelsea Gold Medal. Her stand was highly praised in the press and she was asked to write her first book, The Dry Garden (1978). Orders and visitors began to stream in. Her Damp Garden followed in 1982.
Soon she added new office space and created new beds and areas of planting. In 1987, when winds ripped through a small wooded area next to the gardens, she seized the challenge and created a refuge for shade-loving plants – a process chronicled in Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden (2002). By the early 1990s her gardens were attracting between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors a year, forcing her to open a larger car park. She transformed the old car park into a gravel garden for drought resistant plants; Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden was published in 2000.
In the 1980s she embarked on a fruitful collaboration with the garden writer Christopher Lloyd. They travelled together on lecture tours and in 1988 published Dear Friend and Gardener, a selection of their letters to each other. Her other books included Beth Chatto’s Garden Notebook (1997), Beth Chatto’s Green Tapestry (1999) and Plant Portraits (1985).
Beth Chatto won, in 1988, the RHS’S Victoria Medal of Honour, the society’s highest accolade. In 1999, she won the Garden Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. She was appointed OBE in 2002.
In addition to gardening, she spent many years nursing her husband Andrew, who suffered from emphysema and died in 1999. But she never lost her curiosity and zest for life, always getting up at the crack of dawn to get on with a new piece of planting or write an article.
In 2008-9 she was honoured with a Retrospective at the Garden Museum, south-east London, and in 2014 she received the John Brookes Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Garden Designers.
Beth Chatto is survived by her two daughters.
Beth Chatto, born June 27 1923, died May 13 2018