1st August 2024  – The Life and Work of Beth Chatto – Speaker Alison Moller

Our August speaker was Alison Moller, on the subject of Beth Chatto.  Alison is a landscape garden historian and a retired teacher.

Beth’s early childhood was spent in Great Chesterford. Her parents realised quite early on that she was interested in plants and gave her a small plot of her own. She found that snowdrops, lily of the valley and ferns grew well together, her 1st experience of plant association.  She moved to Elmstead Market in Suffolk and attended a teacher training college in Bury St Edmunds. Gardening was used as a teaching tool, and her final year project was to study plants in different salinity conditions. She married Andrew Chatto, who researched the writings of plant hunters & travellers and gave up teaching to help run the farm. While spending some time in the Alps studying plants & their environment, Beth realised that she was growing the wrong plants in the wrong places back in Suffolk.

It was in 1960, that Beth started to design her garden, from a piece of ground belonging to Andrew’s farm. Bulldozers and diggers were deployed to create a pond and do the main structural work. She started a nursery to help with the finances and Andrew sold the farm to devote his time in helping with Beth’s project. The garden was developed in stages: scree beds, inspired by her travel to the Alps, water garden using muted colours to act as a restful place, reflection space, to sit and meditate, reservoir and also she experimenting with grasses. Her most famous “room” is the gravel garden, started in 1991 and has never been watered. This was inspired by her friend Derek Jarman, whose garden was on the coast, on limestone, very dry and didn’t retain water.

Over the next few decades, there were many people who inspired her, like Cedric Morris, a painter and plant enthusiast, Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter garden and a writer.

She developed an interest in flower arranging, inspired by Constance Fry, the importance of shape & texture of foliage and experimented using different containers. She received a silver medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1975 for “Unusual Plants” theme and was nearly disqualified for using weeds as part of her foliage display. By the late 1980’s she had received 10 gold medals.

In 1987, Beth was awarded the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour, followed by an OBE in 2002. She set up an Educational Trust, which is still running today. The trust offers a variety of workshops events and courses throughout the year. There is a grass named after her; Miscanthus siensis “Beth Chatto”. In 2021 the garden won gold in Visit England.

Some of the ground is now under threat from housing development. Although the garden itself is protected, the car park and picnic area are not. So watch this space!!

Beth’s philosophy was that if you put the right plant in the right place, it  will grow happily.

Many of us are going on a day trip at the end of the month to visit the garden.

Hanna Roberts

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