‘Right plant, right place’ is one of gardening’s most simple, and oft-challenging, mantras. It is also the essence of an enormous legacy left by Beth Chatto, the plantswoman, garden designer and author whose groundbreaking approach to landscape-responsive horticulture left a blueprint for how we can garden in a climate catastrophe.
Back in 1960, when British gardening prized gaudy colours and blousy blooms, Chatto and her husband Andrew took over seven acres of daunting wilderness, five miles east of Colchester, in Essex. Blasted by north-easterly winds every winter, the location offered low rainfall, boggy clay and drought-riddled gravel. Yet this was where Chatto would create a garden that remains a constant inspiration.
While visitors to Chatto’s gardens will be able to see woodland, water and shade planting, it is the Gravel Garden – borne of a car park, and famously never watered – that holds clues about preparing and planting for a future of 40-degree summers.
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Chatto’s fascination and respect for a plant’s origins, from the rocks of the Swiss Alps to the dust of the American southwest, enabled her to build a plant collection that remains one of the most covetable and cutting-edge around – a century after her birth. Here, we meet three modern landscape designers who are channelling Chatto’s approach for today’s gardens.
Ula Maria, landscape architect, garden designer and author
After exploding onto the scene with a gold medal at RHS Tatton in 2017, Lithuanian designer and landscape architect Ula Maria has enchanted visitors at Hampton Court and Shenzhen Flower Show with creations that are surprising, modern and dreamy. Her 2021 pink-walled garden of pennisetum and foxgloves proved to be Instagram catnip and to top it all off, she just scooped a Best in Show award at the RSH Chelsea Flower Show for her first ever entry, a garden inspired by the joys of forest bathing that she designed for the charity Muscular Dystrophy UK
‘There are so many things that I admire about Chatto’s work, but perhaps one of the more obvious ones would be her ability to listen to the land and understand the sites that she’s working with,’ Maria says. It’s exactly this approach that she took in her father’s domestic garden in Northampton.
Faced with very poor soil, a south-facing position and no desire to install irrigation, Maria opted for ‘sun-loving ’ Mediterranean plants and a playful approach to composition to keep it looking as naturalistic as possible.
Will Scholey, garden designer and horticulturist
Newcomer Will Scholey won RHS Young Designer of the Year in 2022 with a design that channelled Chatto’s car-park creation by repurposing London kerb stones rather than bringing in new, less sustainable, hard landscaping.
Having encountered Chatto’s books in his university library, Scholey says he’s admired her approach ever since. ‘I often find myself reverting back to the concept of “right plant, right place” after getting a little carried away,’ he admits.
Scholey, whose projects combine the heft of materials such as corten steel alongside bold clusters of grasses and fig trees, recommends starting early to get ahead with drought-tolerant planting.
‘I have had most success planting gardens in the winter months using nine-centimetre pots and a gravel mulch,’ he explains. ‘It gives the plants time to get their roots down before the drought conditions take hold, while the gravel mulch helps to retain moisture in the soil.’
Errol Reuben Fernandes, head of horticulture, Horniman Museum and Gardens
During last summer’s heatwave, Errol Reuben Fernandes broadcast on Instagram from the Grasslands Garden, next to the South Circular. While the rest of London was frying, the Horniman Museum’s prairie-inspired design was looking resplendent.
Since taking over the gardens in 2021, Fernandes – who has a background in fine art alongside horticulture – has combined a curatorial eye with plant pragmatism to make more resilient planting choices.
‘Beth had a very skilled eye for composition,’ he says. ‘It’s so important when setting out a planting scheme.’ His latest transformation is of the ‘sun-baked’ borders at the museum’s entrance, where he has chosen to swap the bamboo that formerly ‘swamped’ the area for a variety of drought-tolerant species.
The revolutionary work, though, lies beneath: concrete and rubble from renovating the site’s paths has been repurposed to create new ‘micro environments’ in the landscape.‘You won’t see it, but it will enable us to play and experiment with a much wider range of plants,’ he explains.
