{"id":2945,"date":"2020-01-06T05:31:27","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T13:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=2945"},"modified":"2020-01-06T05:33:30","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T13:33:30","slug":"book-review-beth-chatto-a-life-in-plants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/book-review-beth-chatto-a-life-in-plants\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review–Beth Chatto: A Life With Plants"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chatto<\/a>The latter half of the twentieth century produced a bumper crop of great gardeners, garden designers and garden personalities.\u00a0 I have been inspired by many of them, especially British born Beth Chatto, 1923-2018, who shone brightly in that horticultural pantheon.\u00a0 Now, an authorized biography, Beth Chatto: A Life With Plants, <\/em>presents a fond, but unvarnished look at Chatto\u2019s life and work.<\/p>\n

Unlike other garden luminaries like Vita Sackville West, Chatto did not start her life as an aristocrat, surrounded from birth by fabled gardens.\u00a0 She was the daughter of a village constable and his wife who kept a typical English cottage garden and prided themselves on growing their own vegetables.\u00a0 The seeds of Beth Chatto\u2019s career were sown in that home garden and fertilized by the precocious child\u2019s belief that she was \u201cdriven or had the energy to discover a wider world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chatto trained to be a teacher and had just embarked on that career when she married Andrew Chatto, a fruit farmer who came from a wealthy publishing family.\u00a0 Despite a fourteen year age difference, the couple\u2019s shared interests in botany and horticulture brought and kept them together.<\/p>\n

Beth Chatto gave up teaching with the birth of first child and turned her prodigious energies to gardening and flower arranging, entering shows and winning ever-more prestigious prizes.\u00a0 She made a name for herself by using garden plants, flowers, and even vegetable materials rather than florists\u2019 specimens.\u00a0 An award-winning 1957 arrangement, for example, featured \u201conion heads, artichoke thistles, ballota, giant eryngiums.\u201d\u00a0 These early arrangements echoed the naturalistic compositions of society florist Constance Spry, who was famous for making artistic use of garden flowers, roadside weeds and other non-traditional materials.<\/p>\n

Eventually Chatto decided to open a small nursery on part of the farm property.\u00a0 Her nursery offerings and displays were created with the same sensibility as her arrangements, going beyond colorful flowers into thoughtful groupings of plants with complementary textures, forms and, especially, cultural needs.\u00a0 The nursery caught on, and to boost sales, she began issuing printed plant lists for mail order customers.\u00a0 These efforts, plus Chatto\u2019s enormous talent for finding and introducing new plant specimens, connecting with like-minded plantspeople, and inspiring others through her writings and presentations, led to an invitation in 1976 to exhibit a nursery display at the Royal Horticultural Society\u2019s Chelsea Flower Show.<\/p>\n

At the time, other plant vendors arranged their offerings \u201cin serried ranks of visible pots at various levels\u201d.\u00a0 Within the confines of a relatively small stand, Chatto created a garden-like arrangement with plants grouped in a naturalistic way according to their preferred conditions\u2014dry\/ sunny, or cool\/shady.\u00a0 The display was a hit with attendees, as well as judges, who awarded her one of the Silver Gilt\u2014second place\u2014medals.\u00a0 She was disappointed not to win a Gold Medal, but returned in 1977 and went home with her first gold.<\/p>\n

Chelsea success brought her fame, along with speaking and book offers.\u00a0 Her first book, The Dry Garden, <\/em>was published in 1978.\u00a0 This was followed by more books, including; The Damp Garden; Plant Portraits; Beth Chatto\u2019s Garden Notebook; The Green Tapestry; Beth Chatto\u2019s Gravel Garden; Beth Chatto\u2019s Shade Garden; <\/em>and, with her friend and fellow plantsman, Christopher Lloyd, Dear Friend and Gardener.\u00a0 <\/em>All are still available and should be required reading for committed gardeners.<\/p>\n

By the time of Beth Chatto\u2019s death in 2018, she was known worldwide in horticultural circles.\u00a0 Her nursery, expanded far beyond its original confines and featuring numerous specialty display gardens, is still a \u201cmust see\u201d for garden tourists visiting England.<\/p>\n

What made Beth Chatto so special?\u00a0 She combined an artist\u2019s feeling for color, texture, composition and balance with an incredible knowledge of plants.\u00a0 She was one of the leading practitioners of the \u201cright plant, right place\u201d philosophy, maintaining that close attention to plants\u2019 cultural needs and preferred habitats would lead to successful gardens and landscapes.\u00a0 Her gravel garden, for example, composed mostly of drought-resistant Mediterranean plants and mulched with gravel, has almost never required supplemental water.<\/p>\n

Though she used flowers to great effect in her arrangements and gardens, she knew that successful gardens had to encompass much more, including foliage, fruits and seedheads.\u00a0 She \u201cpainted\u201d with plants, creating combinations that were both beautiful and sustainable.\u00a0 Perhaps most important of all, she proved that purposeful environmentalism is not only compatible with inspiring gardens, but essential to sustaining them.\u00a0 Her philosophy is as vital today as it was the day she won her first Gold Medal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latter half of the twentieth century produced a bumper crop of great gardeners, garden designers and garden personalities.\u00a0 I have been inspired by many of them, especially British born Beth Chatto, 1923-2018, who shone brightly in that horticultural pantheon.\u00a0 Now, an authorized biography, Beth Chatto: A Life With Plants, presents a fond, but unvarnished … 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":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[714,2233,2232,863,238,2234,2036,1896],"class_list":["post-2945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-beth-chatto","tag-famous-gardeners","tag-garden-biogrphies","tag-garden-design","tag-garden-history","tag-garden-inspiration","tag-right-plant-right-place","tag-women-gardeners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945","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=2945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2949,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945\/revisions\/2949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}