Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden - Hardcover

Chatto, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670892602 ISBN 13: 9780670892600

Publisher: Michael Joseph, 2000

Synopsis

The author reveals the secret of creating drought-proof gardens by using gravel, offering thousands of tips on how to protect plants during low-rainfall periods.

About this title

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

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Beth Chatto has to be the plantswoman of the century because she knows how to please plants . . . a desire to emulate these beautiful plantings should be enough to drive all serious gardeners to read the book

About this edition

• Publisher: Michael Joseph
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0670892602
• ISBN 13: 9780670892600
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192