Obituary - Beth Chatto, influential gardener and writer

Died: May 13, 2018

BETH Chatto, who has died aged 94, was an influential gardener and writer known for her mantra that plants should be placed in an environment as close to their natural habitat as possible. It was an outlook that won her many awards including ten successive gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. Although she claimed never to have coined the phrase, "right plant, right place" was always her abiding tenet.

She was born in Good Easter, Essex, and attended Colchester Girls’ High School, later training to be a teacher during the Second World War. In the early 1940s, she met fruit farmer, Andrew Chatto, who shared her love of plants, and they were married in 1943.

In the early 1950s, a close neighbour, Pamela Underwood, who ran a nursery, encouraged Chatto to become involved with flower arranging and they both became founder members of the Colchester Flower Club, the second flower club in Britain.

By the late 1950s, Chatto had persuaded her husband to build a house on part of his fruit farm at Elmstead Market where she went on to create what has become one of the most famous and loved gardens in the world. In 1967 she also opened a small nursery that became a place of pilgrimage for keen gardeners.

In early 1975, she was persuaded to enter a small selection of plants at a Royal Horticultural Society show in London, dug up from the garden. Unknown to her at the time, one of the judges wanted to have her exhibit disqualified as he felt her native plants were no more than weeds. The other judges disagreed and she was awarded an RHS Flora Silver Medal.

Her first exhibit at the RHS’s Chelsea Flower Show in 1976 won a Flora Silver Gilt medal, but the following year came the first of ten successive Chelsea Gold Medals.

In 1978, she wrote her first book, The Dry Garden, and in 1982 The Damp Garden. These were followed by Plant Portraits (1985), Beth Chatto’s Notebook (1988), and The Green Tapestry (1989). In 1998, she collaborated with her friend, Christopher Lloyd in Dear Friend and Gardener. This was followed by Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden (2000), and Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden (2002). The Gravel Garden, on the site of the old car park, was to become her most famous achievement displaying plants carefully chosen to cope with ultra-dry conditions which have never been watered other than by light Essex rainfall.

Among the many awards bestowed on Chatto, she was given two honorary doctorates, one from Essex University in 1988, and from Anglia Ruskin University in 2009. She also received a lifetime achievement award from the Garden Writers’ Guild in 1998, an OBE in 2002, and The John Brookes Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Garden Designers in 2009.

Chatto's garden and nursery continue to thrive under the direction of her granddaughter, Julia Boulton. The Beth Chatto Education Trust was established in 2015 to promote her beliefs and give practical advice to future generations of young gardeners.

Beth Chatto is survived by two daughters, five grandchildren and five great grandchildren.