Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden

Tracing the Origins of Havenwood

Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden book in my entry garden at Havenwood

As I consider the many gardeners who have helped me to form my ideas of how a garden should be put together, I realize that it was probably Beth Chatto who had the biggest influence on my love of shade gardens. Her book, Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden was the first to open for me the wide assortment of beautiful plants that grow in wooded areas.

Who was Beth Chatto?

“Beth Chatto OBE VMH was an English plantswoman, garden designer and author known for creating and describing the gardens named after her near Elmstead Market, Essex. She wrote several books about gardening under specific conditions and lectured on this in Britain, North America, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. Her principle of placing the right plant in the right place drew on her husband Andrew Chatto's lifelong research into garden-plant origins.”¹

Here are several plants that I first learned about, or began to understand their full range, through garden writer Beth Chatto…

Yellow Wax bells, Kirengeshoma

Yellow waxbells, Kirengeshoma, I met first in the pages of this book.

“We had always intended to preserve this area as a natural feature, to allow it to develop as it would, as a home for native flora and fauna, but then came the hurricane of October 1987. In one wild night Nature made decisions I would not have dared contemplate, twisting trees out of the ground like corkscrews, whipping off heads and limbs indiscriminately. It was a shocking scene of destruction.

Once we had stopped mourning the loss, I decided to make a new garden where, beneath green-lichened tree trunks, shade-loving plants would carpet the floor and groups of shrubs would create microclimates and backgrounds for herbaceous plants and bulbs that provide a long season of interest….”

🌿 Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden