Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden Book

In Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden the author takes her work with ecological planting to a new level. Ecological planting essentially means establishing an environment for the plants in which they will grow well with minimum interference; or rather, to put it the other way round, it means using those plants whose native habitat most closely resembles the soil and climatic conditions of your garden. Beth Chatto has spent many years cultivating a largely dry, stony garden in Essex, the soil of which, she says, looks "just like the beach at nearby Frinton-on-Sea". Her experiences with drought-resistant planting have been recorded in The Damp Garden and The Dry Garden. The removal of a car-park gave her the opportunity to experiment on an unprecedented scale, and so the Gravel Garden was begun. Inspired by a trip to the mountains of New Zealand and an unplanned encounter with Derek Jarman's shingle garden, it is entirely unwatered, even in times of drought; its governing image being a dried-up river bed. The results, far from being arid, are of extraordinary richness. Beth Chatto's planting style is characterised by flowing forms, drifts of colour, plants growing through each other and establishing new relationships in the course of the year. The quality of attention she devotes to individual plant species and their habits, as she describes the development of the Gravel Garden, is one of the most outstanding things about this remarkable book. --Robin DavidsonRead More