At one with nature | 14 January 2009

Beth Chatto — A Retrospective
Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1, until 19 April

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.