Further Reports from Essex

The Glory Flower, glorious at every stage.

Beth Chatto speaks in perfect sentences. She could be reading aloud from one of her brilliantly written books. Sometimes she digresses to talk about well-known friends who have helped to formulate her ideas, but it's the plants she wants to talk about: she is all about plants and plantsmanship.

"Form and texture is more important to me than colour," she explains. "I've always had grasses. People want petals and colour but I think: 'What would grass add?'"

Hers is a colourful garden however. The glory flower (clerodendrum bungei), above, pops up unexpectedly in a shady area and it stopped me short on my visit. Yes, it has good fresh green foliage for this time of year but its flowering habit is amazing and intriguing.

"Until the flower arranging movement [post-WW2], gardens were full of cultivars," continues Mrs Chatto. "Hemerocallis and chrysanthemums were bred to have small stems and big flowers. To me," she says with some determination, "those flowers were not elegant." 

Beth Chatto filled a need with her new ideas. "People kept asking me about my unusual plants," she says about the flower arranging years. She had sympathy with Constance Spry and they shared an appreciation of foliage, with Spry famously elevating kale into a vase-worthy plant. 'Radical' is not a word that Beth Chatto has a problem with.

News from Essex, with Beth Chatto

Crossing the border into Essex last week the skies were noticeably brighter. I walked into Beth Chatto's garden before opening time and wandered on my own around the calming lakes in the water garden. There was a 1960s house in its midst, and a slim lady of a certain age walking around with a watering can who didn't see me. I tiptoed around the carpet of turf.

Even after the gardening public began to step gingerly around, talking quietly, the garden retained this feeling of being private, completely imbued with the personality of the woman who created it. No gardening by committee here: the acanthus above is allowed to flop because it looks interesting. It makes a good picture.

"I aim to make pictures with form, texture and colour," says Beth Chatto later as we sit on a bench in the Gravel Garden. The sense of peace and quiet has long gone and children are charging around. The world famous Gravel Garden is a former car park and even now it seems to be the main route for deliveries. A parcel van reverses towards us, beeping loudly. "I don't mean a picture hanging on a wall, with a frame," she continues serenely. "It's an evolving picture... Which means there is a lot of editing. Trees and shrubs double in size; you put things down as ground cover and then they take over... Just this morning we were going around and I was saying 'let's start again with this.'"

There was no garden or house here before 1960, just dry Essex land. The layout does not follow Victorian guide lines but is free and fluid and yet curiously of its time. The planting follows the Japanese 'line of beauty': "The structure of the bed forms a triangle, and within that triangle there are more triangles." They are essentially giant island beds and what could be more 1960s than that.

The garden is very neat,  without being 'tidy'. "I like a certain amount of freedom but there needs to be control as well," says Beth Chatto. Although many of her ideas have caught up with her over the years Mrs Chatto has always been a radical. She is completely immune to gardening fashions. "Nature is not distracted by fashion," she says, almost indignantly. There are plants here which have earned their place and are outside the zeitgest. Right plant for the right place: it's her thing - she may even have invented the idea. If it works, it works. And by the way, she used grasses fifty years ago.