Beth Chatto

Beth Chatto OBE VMH (born June 27, 1923 in Good Easter , Essex as Beth Little ; † May 13, 2018 ) was a British nursery owner.

Life

Chatto was born in 1923 to a village policeman and had two brothers. She grew up in Great Chesterfield , Essex before the family moved to Elmstead Market . As a child she looked after a piece of land in her parents' garden. She attended Colchester County High School for Girls and then trained as a teacher. Chatto was a member of the Colchester Flower Club, where she learned to put cut flowers together. Chatto was also interested in the plants of the local salt marshes . So she met Andrew Chatto (* 1909), an orcharder from Radlett in Hertfordshire , who had lived for a while in the USA ( Laguna Beach , California). He came from a London publishing family (his father Andrew Chatto (1841-1913) founded the publishing house Chatto and Windus in 1873 , which grew out of a printing company founded by John Camden Hotten in 1855 ). They married in 1943. Andrew Chatto was very interested in plant ecology and although he never published, he collected a lot of data on selected eco-zones, including looking at Russian literature. He was strongly influenced by the German plant sociology. His archives are now available online with the help of gardening author Noel Kingsbury , the Hardy Plant Society and numerous volunteers.

The couple initially lived in Colchester in the home of Andrew's parents. In 1960 the family built the modern White Barn House bungalow on fallow land on Andrew Chatto's orchard and moved from Colchester to Elmstead Market. The farm is on the Clacton road. Chatto helped with her husband's gardening business. With the help of Andrew Chatto, she began to plant a garden around the house. Only the old oaks remained, everything else was redesigned. Chatto removed old ramparts with a bulldozer to make room for ornamental plants, and leveled a badger den in order to create her “Mediterranean garden” in 1960. Since her husband's orchard yielded little profit, Beth Chatto had to look for another source of income and therefore founded an ornamental plant business called "Unusual Plants" in 1967, which specialized in perennials. She was able to use her relationships with Helene von Stein-Zeppelin in Laufen in Baden, who she supplied with plants that were not available in England. The artist Cedrick Morris introduced them to many unusual plant species and gave them offshoots. In 1987 she won her last gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show .

The orchard, which had never made good returns, was closed in 1970 and the land was sold, after which the family lived on the gardening of ornamental plants.

Beth Chatto wrote numerous books on the creation of ornamental gardens in "problematic situations" (dry, damp, shady) and from 1983 onwards went on international lecture tours, sometimes together with Christopher Lloyd , to Australia, Canada and the USA. She also traveled to Morocco and South Africa. Beth Chatto was also interested in music, with Christopher Lloyd she attended operas in the exclusive Glyndebourne . Chatto exhibited her plant arrangements at Royal Horticultural Society exhibitions , but her first stand was nearly turned down because it featured too many weeds.

Her husband died after a long illness and suffered from emphysema in 1999. The couple had two daughters, Diana and Mary.

garden

Beth Chatto-Garden in Elmstead Market, Essex

The Chattos Garden is located in Elmstead Market near Colchester in Essex , a very dry area by English standards with an average of 510 mm of rainfall per year and strong easterly winds. It lies on a terminal moraine , the soil consists of gravel , sand and boulder clay with embedded chalk .

There was also a piece of marshland with springs on the site. Chatto designed the drainage ditch to form four square ponds surrounded by marsh plants. The swamp garden is located here today . Here grow among other Gunnera , pink ornamental persicaria ( Persicaria bistorta ) pontederia , bamboo, ferns and bald cypresses and numerous brightly colored primrose hybrids. The Japanese hostas, which are very popular in England, in their different, often variegated varieties, are used abundantly.

After the great storm of 1987, Chatto laid out a forest garden in the shade of oak trees in 1989. Snowdrops, daffodils and numerous hybrid Christmas roses in numerous pastel shades grow here. In spring, red and yellow imperial crowns add some color to the flat landscape.

An article by Graham Rose in the Sunday Times popularized Chatto's dry garden across the UK and led to the publication of her book The dry Garden in 1978 . The famous gravel garden was intended to demonstrate to English garden enthusiasts after the " drought year " of 1976 that a garden could do without watering. In the winter of 1991, Chatto planted the former driveway to her house and the unpaved parking lot with plants from Mediterranean and steppe areas after she had purchased a new piece of land for another parking lot. There. A hedge of Leyland cypress trees provided shelter from the wind. The subsoil consisted of gravel, but had been improved with humus when Chatto had laid out her 90 m long “long borders” here in the 1960s, based on the model of Gertrude Jekyll . The outlines of the beds followed the principle of "island beds" that was popular at the time and were laid out with the help of a garden hose in swaying lines that were supposed to imitate a dry river bed. Chatto mixed drought-resistant plants from all continents, the gravel garden contains Mexican palm lilies , ornamental lilies from the Capensis , American agaves and Australian eucalyptus trees . Different types of rockrose , holy herb , shrub veronica , ornamental onion , gypsum herb , man litter and milkweed are used particularly frequently. Conifers like cypresses add vertical accents, the North American vinegar tree provides bright colors in autumn. The garden has not been watered since it was set up, but is thriving. The use of gravel followed the use of bark mulch and straw to keep the garden easy to maintain. When choosing plants, Chatto was able to fall back on the extensive studies of her husband. However, she admits that she often disregarded his advice.

Since the gravel garden was set up, Chatto has meticulously recorded the daily rainfall, and her letters to Christopher Lloyd describe every single downpour in detail. In Germany, however, she felt disturbed by the sound of heavy rain.

Chatto's interest in ecology did not mean that she renounced the use of poisons or peat . For the borders she recommends the "thorough" use of the defoliant 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid , but this could prevent the plants from reproducing themselves through seeds. She recommends Paraquat (not approved in the EU) to destroy lawns, Basamid (not approved in Germany) to "sterilize" soil and Azulox against ferns. Even after she switched to "ecological" horticulture, the paths were still regularly treated with poison.

The garden is open to paying visitors. In 2006 Chatto opened a café (tea room) on the premises, where visitors can buy trinkets and souvenirs. The well-ordered vegetable garden, which is not open to the public, has become a place of refuge for Chatto.

Her numerous employees include head gardener David Ward, who is responsible for the propagation of the plants. Fergus Garrett worked as a gardener for Chatto before moving to Great Dixter to Christopher Lloyd, who gave him more creative freedom. Today the nursery is run by Chatto's granddaughter Julia Boulton.

style

Chatto turned down maintenance-intensive lawns . With the exception of the ponds, your gardens largely manage without fixed installations; they are characterized by the arrangement of the plants. Accent plants such as agave americana , candle palm lily or tree heather could be used in place of the conventional statues or gazebos . Concrete slabs serve as paths and steps, which the husband made at home according to her instructions. Chatto places particular emphasis on differences in foliage and uses plants with large leaves as accent plants. The change in the foliage is a relaxation for the eyes and mind. The frequent use of variegated varieties in the gardens deliberately destroys any impression of closeness to nature, the visitor is always aware of being in a show garden .

As a design principle, she liked to use the triangle, as she had learned from arranging flowers according to the rules of Japanese Ikebana . She warns that a lack of principles in the garden, as elsewhere, creates chaos. For Chatto, color is less important in garden design, she emphasizes that color schemes often come about by themselves. Overall, however, she prefers traditional, “delicate” color combinations and plants with silver-gray leaves. There. But she also put pink and yellow together, to the horror of Christopher Lloyd. When creating a border, she first paid attention to the appropriate environment, then to the shape and leaves of the plants. Only then do the flowers come. The basic planting of a border could then be loosened up with annual plants, herbs and conditionally hardy plants in order to repeat or emphasize certain colors. But even a self-sown plant could loosen up a scheme. All in all, the right yardstick is always important. To avoid an "ice-cream soda" effect, she places plants with large leaves between plants with many colorful flowers.

Chatto names the real bindweed as a favorite plant . Oriental hellebores , milkweed plants such as palisade milkweed , geraniums and ornamental onions are also typical of their style .

Influences

The eccentric plant collector and artist Cedric Morris was a major influence on Chatto; the plants in his collection formed the basis of their nursery. She mentions the gardener Graham Stuart Thomas , who ran the Sunningdale Nursery in Surrey , as a further influence. She received further plants from the "Iris-Countess" Helene von Stein-Zeppelin in the Meierhof in Laufen in the 1970s . She was amazed to find so many plants here that were completely unknown to her from England. She later obtained plants from the Ewald Hügin nursery in the north of Freiburg , which specializes in drought-resistant plants.

Broad impact

Chatto exhibited her plants in the exhibitions of the Royal Horticultural Society in Westminster , since 1976 at the Chelsea Flower Show , where she won ten gold medals between 1977 and 1987. What was new was that it also showed plants that were not modified by breeding and that its exhibition was organized according to ecological criteria.

The success of Chatto has made the plants it marketed so popular that they can now be found in many home gardens in the UK and have quickly lost the novelty value they had in the 1980s.

In 2008 the Lambeth Garden Museum dedicated an exhibition to Chatto. Chatto also started a foundation.

Works

• The Dry Garden . London, Orion 1977.
• The Damp Garden 1982 (New Illustrated Edition 2004).
• Plant Portraits 1985.
• The Beth Chatto Garden Notebook , 1988.
• The Green Tapestry, Perennial Plants for the Garden . Harper Collins 1990.
• Dear Friend and Gardener, letters exchanged between Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd , 1998.

Dear Friend and Gardener! An exchange of letters about life, gardening and friendship. Correspondence with Christopher Lloyd. Translated by Christoph Gurlitt u. Maria Gurlitt-Sartori. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 2013. ISBN 978-3-421-03887-6

• Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden , 2000.
• Drought resistant planting (Photographs Steven Wooster) . London, Frances Lincoln 2000. ISBN 978-0-7112-1425-5
• Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden, Shade-Loving Plants for Year-Round Interest (photography Steven Wooster) Cassell 2002 ISBN 978-0-304-36366-7 (reissued as Beth Chatto's Shade Garden, 2008 ).

Shade garden: the plants, the seasons, the moods . Translated by Stefan Leppert. Deutsche Verlagsanst. 2011. ISBN 978-3-421-03808-1

• A life for the garden . ISBN 978-3-86244119-8

Awards

• 1987: Victoria Medal of Honor from the Royal Horticultural Society
• 1987: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex
• 2002: Order of the British Empire ( OBE )

literature

• Fergus Garrett, A year in the life of Beth Chatto's Gardens (Photographs by Rachel Warne). London, Frances Lincoln 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Beth Chatto 27th June 1923 - 13th May 2018. In: bethchatto.co.uk. May 14, 2018, accessed May 14, 2018 . 
2. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 62
3. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 62
4. ↑ Noel Kingsbury 2010, http://www.bethchatto.co.uk/andrew.html last viewed on 23/12/2012
5. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, Jan.
7. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 94
8. ^ Christian Lloyd, The Beth Chatto Gardens. In: Other People's gardens , Viking 1995, 30
9. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 64
10. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 64
11. ↑ Noel Kingsbury 2010, http://www.bethchatto.co.uk/andrew.html last viewed on 23/12/2012
12. ↑ Beth Chatto, Nursery woman. In: Diana Ross, Gardeners: Encounters with Exceptional People. Frances Lincoln 2008, 124
13. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 16, 80
14. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 62
15. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 5
16. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, 5
17. ↑ Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden. Retrieved January 27, 2018 . 
18. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, xi
19. ^ Christian Lloyd, The Beth Chatto Gardens. In: Other People's gardens , Viking 1995, 39
20. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 35-53
21. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, xi
22. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln
23. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 57
24. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 18
25. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 34-35
26. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 41
27. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 88
28. ↑ Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, London, Orion 1978, 95
29. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 53
30. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 53
31. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardenstovisit/7935330/Beth-Chatto-designs-low-water-usage-garden-for-Prince-of-Wales.html
32. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 65
33. ↑ Beth Chatto, Foreword. In: Fergus Garrett, A year in the life of Beth Chatto's Gardens (Photographs by Rachel Warne). London, Frances Lincoln 2012, 8
34. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 97
35. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, 21-22
36. ↑ Beth Chatto, Foreword. In: Fergus Garrett, A year in the life of Beth Chatto's Gardens (Photographs by Rachel Warne). London, Frances Lincoln 2012, 8
37. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, 45
38. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, 45
39. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, 45
40. ^ "Color schemes often seem to make themselves!", Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, 45
41. ^ Christian Lloyd, The Beth Chatto Gardens. In: Other People's gardens , Viking 1995, 33
42. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 17th
43. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 17th
44. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 97
45. ↑ Beth Chatto, Nursery woman. In: Diana Ross, Gardeners: Encounters with Exceptional People. Frances Lincoln 2008, 133
46. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden , July 2018, 63
47. ^ Fergus Garrett, A year in the life of Beth Chatto's Gardens (Photographs by Rachel Warne). London, Frances Lincoln 2012, 13
48. ↑ Beth Chatto, Nursery woman. In: Diana Ross, Gardeners: Encounters with exceptional People. Frances Lincoln 2008, 124-133; Beth Chatto, The dry Garden, xi
49. ↑ Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden, xi
50. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 55
51. ↑ Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd 1998, Dear Friend and Gardener, Letters on Life and Gardening. London, Frances Lincoln, 99
52. ↑ Beth Chatto 1998, Beth Chatto's Garden Notebook , revised edition. London, Orion (first edition, Dent 1988), 56
53. ↑ Beth Chatto, Nursery woman. In: Diana Ross, Gardeners: Encounters with exceptional People. Frances Lincoln 2008, 131.
54. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
55. ^ Catherine Horwood, Right Plant, Right Place. The English Garden, July 2018, 65

Web links

• Horticultural website, English
• Garden Museum , English