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The Garden Museum, situated in the old church of St Mary’s, hard by Lambeth Palace, has undergone a major refurbishment. It looks tremendous, much better than in the old days of slight muddle and a feeling of temporary storage. A new freestanding structure of pale wood has been built within the church, a Belvedere, as the architects, Dow Jones, call it. It complements beautifully the limestone columns and interior walls of the former church. Rarely have I seen a renovation look so elegant and so satisfying. The architects thought of the new structure as ‘a raised platform from which to view the landscape of the existing building, as a way of giving a new perspective on to an existing place both spatially and thematically’. Upstairs there are new permanent display galleries, while beneath them on the ground floor is a gallery for temporary exhibitions. One purpose of this gallery is to house a series of retrospectives of contemporary garden-makers. The first is devoted to Beth Chatto (born 1923).
Chatto is one of the most influential gardeners in Britain, who famously created magnificent gardens from a patch of wasteland. Her pioneering ecological approach to garden-making was developed in the 1960s but is of particular interest to gardeners today. The exhibition sets out to identify and examine the various different inspirations which led Chatto to evolve as a gardener in the way that she did. It’s a fascinating story, told mostly through documentary material and with the help of a catalogue which is also the winter issue of the Garden Museum Journal.
In 1943, Beth Little married Andrew Chatto. They lived in Colchester and had two daughters, and Beth’s life was divided between looking after the family and helping out at White Barn Farm, Andrew’s fruit farm at Elmstead Market. In 1951 she was involved with setting up the Colchester Flower Club and became a visiting demonstrator for other flower clubs. In the Fifties she first met the celebrated artist-plantsman Cedric Morris, and taught herself to propagate plants from ‘the precious screws of paper full of seed, berries or cuttings’ he gave her. Although her husband was a fruit farmer, he was not really a businessman, his heart being in the study of the natural origins and associations of garden plants. Beth Chatto absorbed her husband’s knowledge and wisdom and applied it to her own ambition to make a series of gardens out of the rough ground behind their new house at White Barn Farm. She began to make the Damp Garden and the Mediterranean Garden in 1960, and by 1967 was ready to start trading as Unusual Plants, enabling her husband to give up the farm.
Through the late 1970s Chatto’s fame grew as she began to exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show and won the first of ten consecutive Gold Medals. In the 1980s she started lecturing internationally (she had already begun to publish books about her work), and developed the Wood Garden, followed by the Gravel Garden in 1991. The small nursery she set up to propagate little-known species and foliage plants became a thriving mail-order business, and now people travel from all over the world to visit her gardens. Her key characteristic is that in garden-planning she has always played to the strengths of the land, rather than trying to impose upon it. She collaborates with nature. This is of great interest today in an intellectual and emotional climate which has a growing horror of exploitation.
Chatto is a formidably private person, so it is a real achievement to have included in the exhibition examples of her letters and private journals. But the display is a modest one, and does not venture into any great depth of narrative or enquiry. For instance, I would like to have learnt more about her early career as an instructor for the Flower Club Movement, or had more discussion of how art, music and architecture have influenced her thinking as a garden designer. It’s all very well to state this, but we need examples to illustrate the assertion and help us to understand it better. I enjoyed the two Cedric Morris paintings hanging on the walls of the gallery (particularly ‘Autumn Flowers’ from 1928) and the snatches of classical music I heard amid the soundtrack of birdsong, but I wanted the connections to be closer drawn. And what about the inspiration of architecture? The tone of the exhibition is perhaps slightly too reverential and insufficiently probing. That said, it is refreshing and enjoyable in its modesty.
The Museum was founded in 1977 with the purpose of recording Garden History. It re-opened last November as the Garden Museum with an intensified focus on contemporary issues in gardens and gardening, and has already generated substantial publicity. It deserves to. It makes me rather ashamed of the neglect into which my own garden has currently fallen (owing, I hasten to add, to too many writing commitments). This year I will have to take the garden in hand, literally. And what better inspiration than a trip or two to Beth Chatto’s gardens at Elmstead Market?
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