Columns - Botanical Stories
by Marta Galli
by Marta Galli
On a sweltering summer night—anomalous heat, they call it—I cannot sleep and I open the book that came back from London with me. Dear Friend and Gardener – Letters on Life and Gardening collects the correspondence between Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto, both nursery growers and prolific popularizers; two champions of horticulture. Their respective gardens—Great Dixter and Elmstead Market—lie in south-eastern England, one of the driest areas in Britain.
In a letter to Beth, Lloyd frets over the lack of rain. “When I see plants suffering,” he writes, “it is like having a pet you have neglected to feed. Except that the animal can touch your heart by meowing or complaining. The poor plant cannot do that.” He reproaches Beth for not having watered hers: “I know your garden was suffering, in August, because you told me so yourself, and you were on the point of giving in, if David had not stopped you: ‘No, Beth, not now that we have come this far.’ I think David was wrong, though I know it was exactly what you wanted to hear.”
An old Scandinavian saying has it that there is no such thing as bad weather: there are only unsuitable clothes. Beth Chatto seemed to apply the same principle to what she grew, seeking the perfect point of balance between a plant and its climate. Hence her celebrated motto: right plant, right place. While everyone in England was toying with roses and borders as lavish as wedding cakes, Chatto was drawn to the lime-green confetti of the sculptural Euphorbia characias and to the oriental poppy, faded and alluring as a stray cat. She founded her nursery of unusual plants in Essex in the 1960s and spent a lifetime observing which species thrived without artificial help. In 1991 she turned a former car park into her celebrated Gravel Garden, populating it with plants from arid regions all over the world. The idea had come to her during a trip to New Zealand with Christopher Lloyd himself, as they sat on the dried-up bed of a river.
Today the gravel garden is an extremely fashionable garden type, helped along by rising global temperatures and by its vaguely exotic allure. But Chatto had built hers on the leftover ground of an old car park; it would be another matter entirely to work on naturally fertile, rich ground. She herself was the first to distrust trends. Curiously, like two other women we have written about in these pages—Constance Spry and Marianne North—Beth Chatto too found her vocation relatively late. And in her letters to Lloyd she shares a reflection that is perhaps worth setting down here: “No one is too old if they keep the passion for learning. Absorbing new ideas means living all over again, seeing the world—and our gardens—with new eyes.”