Product Description

The story of how Beth Chatto created her gravel garden on 'possibly the driest, and the most windswept, piece of soil in England' has a message of hope for gardeners everywhere. At the outset she promised herself: 'This garden was not to be irrigated in times of drought. Once established the plants must fend for themselves or die.' The results, beautifully portrayed in Steven Wooster's specially commissioned photographs taken through the seasons, testify to the triumphant outcome of the adventure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46098 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 Davidson

Review
Beth Chatto combines, as well as anyone at work today and better than most, an eye for good plants, knowledge of their ways and a sensitivity when putting them together. --Spectator

From the Publisher
review extract
'Beth Chatto's writing has an engaging modesty and is both accessible and authoritative...and will fire the imagination of both those who have watched her garden develop over past years, and newcomers faced with similar poor droughty conditions.'

Gardens Illustrated, July/Aug 2000

Customer Reviews

A lavishly-illustrated inspiration of a book
Beth Chatto's glorious gravel garden appears to defy the conditions in which it grows, and this is the story of how she came to make it. Crammed with detail, well-described illustrations, and full of little gems of useful information, it is an inspiration to all gardeners, especially those of us who struggle with hot, dry summers in the south of England. Plants for each season are lovingly described, with special favourites given their own mini-chapters. Tucked away at the end is a chapter about her newest, scree garden - if only there was more. Let's hope her next book is already being written - this is a garden I for one would love to know more about!

A real gardeners' book
As always with books written by Beth Chatto, it is an engaging read and lavishly illustrated. A record of real gardening recording both triumphs and disappointments. But above all this book is about the plants. Beth Chatto is a true plants woman and in a league of her own. This book is an inspiration to us all.

Great book, lets have book two please
One of the doyenne of english lady gardeners, Ms. Chatto is a joy to read with a life time of knowledge and love of the subject embedded in the text. On the most unpromising garden site of sandy scree on what was formerly a car park she has created an outstanding series of densely planted beds with year round interest and relatively light labour burden. Some of the pictures could do with fuller explanation, with perhaps those magazine maps that shows what we are looking at in the photograph, but this might just be the depth of interest the book generates when you are trying to understand what you are looking at. With a weaker book one would probably not even notice.

A pragmatic woman Ms. Chatto, I think , it is embarassing to compare what has been created here with ones own garden and the dark thoughts we all harbour about the dry spot near a wall or the soil we have to work with. In fact there can be no excuses for us, and we should really just shut up and raise our game, borrowing extensively from this book among others. Ms. Chatto has been kind enough to provide a complete layout for one of the beds , which will fit nicely as part of my front garden. I will note by placard that it is adopted from Ms. Chatto , but that the faults and mistakes are my own. I paid 25 sterling for it, and don't regret a penny.

She has a great nursery and shipped me a load of different crocosmia earlier this year, very good staff, and the corms were in excellent condition, and expertly packed.