Inspiration for all

In every generation, there are at least two famous gardeners who inspire universal respect, if not necessarily affection, in their contemporaries. From the 1870s they were William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, in Edwardian times Reginald Farrer and E.A. Bowles, in the post-war period Vita Sackville-West and Graham Stuart Thomas, and, since the 1970s, Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto. Only Beth Chatto remains but, at 87, she is in good fettle and presently celebrating 50 years since the Beth Chatto Gardens at Elmstead Market, Essex, were founded.

It would be impossible, I am sure, to find anyone, however generally ill-natured and carping, who would say an unkind word about Beth Chatto because of her warmth of personality, generous spirit, concern for others and exceptional talents as a gardener and ecologist. Beth’s horticultural reputation depends on her having made a large, complex and handsome garden on land that was not fit for agriculture (in places too wet, in others too dry), in a region that experiences as little as 14 inches of rain a year, and developing there a style of gardening underpinned by what we now call ‘sustainability’.