{"id":182,"date":"2009-11-30T05:59:32","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T13:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=182"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:59","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:59","slug":"beth-chatto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/beth-chatto\/","title":{"rendered":"Beth Chatto"},"content":{"rendered":"

BETH CHATTO<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The fall clean-up has brought me face to face, once again, with the difficult areas of my garden.\u00a0 One of these trouble spots lurks in the front.\u00a0 It is home to an array of plants already, but it still looks flat, shady and uninteresting.\u00a0 Another bed, in the back, is slightly less flat, just as shady and equally uninteresting.\u00a0 I was mulling over ideas for these needy beds when I stumbled onto a wonderful magazine article on English gardening guru Beth Chatto.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Chatto, who is eighty-six and still going strong, gave me hope and inspiration.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because she has faced fifty years worth of gardening challenges and mastered them all.\u00a0 In 1960, she started her garden on five acres of overgrown, unpromising ground; some of which was either too wet or too dry for optimal growing conditions.\u00a0 She and her husband, a fruit farmer, persevered, eventually opening a nursery on the property in the 1970’s.\u00a0 Today the nursery still thrives and Beth Chatto Gardens is renowned all over the world.\u00a0 Mrs. Chatto, the recipient of many horticultural awards, has written books based on her garden experience and speaks on the subject to a wide variety of audiences.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Mrs. Chatto claims to have coined the familiar gardeners’ mantra, “right plant, right place,”\u009d and she certainly practices it.\u00a0 Making a virtue out of a necessity, the Chattos gradually transformed their difficult spots into showcases for the plants best suited to specific sets of conditions.\u00a0 The specialty areas on the Chatto property now include gravel, scree, water and woodland gardens.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The gravel garden was built in 1991 on a former parking lot and planted with drought tolerant species including grasses, lavender and bergenia.\u00a0 It receives no supplemental irrigation, even in drought years.\u00a0 The key to the garden’s survival is carefully amended soil, coupled with intelligent plant selection and the excellent mulching qualities of gravel.\u00a0 The process of creating this inspired planting scheme is documented in a book, Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden: Drought-Resistant Planting Through the Year <\/em>(Viking Penguin, 2000). \u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 According to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary<\/em>, “scree”\u009d is a word of Scandinavian origin meaning, “an accumulation of loose stones<\/u><\/span> or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base<\/u><\/span> of a hill or cliff.”\u009d\u00a0 Chatto’s “scree garden”\u009d is smaller than the gravel garden and composed of raised beds, also mulched with gravel.\u00a0 Like the dry garden at the New York Botanical Garden, it is home to alpine plants and other small, drought tolerant specimens that might be lost in larger planting areas.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mrs. Chatto’s woodland and water gardens are careful compositions of plants suitable for shady or wet conditions.\u00a0 One of the genera she grows, astilbe, falls into the latter category.\u00a0 I love the feathery flowers but I can’t seem to fine the “right place”\u009d for them on my property.\u00a0 After the holidays I will turn to Beth Chatto’s Damp Garden: Moisture-Loving Plants for Year-Round Interest<\/span> <\/em>(Cassell PLC, 2005) for help in the matter.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Creative as her garden ideas are, Beth Chatto is even more inspiring as a person.\u00a0 This is most evident in her book, Dear Friend and Gardener: Letters on Life and Gardening,<\/span><\/em> (Frances Lincoln, 2006).\u00a0 The book is a series of letters between Chatto and her close friend, the late Christopher Lloyd, a sometimes irascible titan of British gardening.\u00a0 Though the letters were undoubtedly intended for publication, the friendship was not contrived.\u00a0 The intellectual curiosity and mutual respect of both parities comes through, as does a mutual love of gardening and cooking.\u00a0 If you are stumped for a good holiday gift for a gardening friend, the Chatto\/Lloyd letters would make an excellent offering.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Chatto is also an inspiration for anyone who worries that aging knees, backs and other body parts may lead to the end of gardening.\u00a0 In the article I read, written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Beth Chatto Gardens, she concludes by saying that she can’t imagine life without gardening.\u00a0 I couldn’t agree more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BETH CHATTO \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The fall clean-up has brought me face to face, once again, with the difficult areas of my garden.\u00a0 One of these trouble spots lurks in the front.\u00a0 It is home to an array of plants already, but it still looks flat, shady and uninteresting.\u00a0 Another bed, in the back, is slightly less … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-winter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1607,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/1607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}