Buying Beth Chatto’s Shade Garden, with the garden I have, was simply a no-brainer. With four or five trees packed into a long, narrow garden, there is plenty (too much?) shade to make use of. However, I am not sure who made the point, but if you don’t have any shade, you should make some.
Beth Chatto is one of my heroes. As one of the world’s foremost plantswomen, she popularised the idea of ‘right plant, right place’ (which is punchy and understandable, but does beg the question as to whether you can have ‘right plant, wrong place’ or ‘wrong plant, right place’, but I digress). I was immensely saddened to read that she had passed away in May 2018. However, I did get to visit her garden (see Beth Chatto’s Plants & Gardens) while she was still alive, and it was a wonderful experience.
In this respect, one of the reasons why I went was to see what she had down in the little woodland area on the site. As she writes about those troublesome shady corners of a garden:
“Fortunately, there are plants adapted by Nature to a vast range of conditions an y choosing suitable plants we can transform almost any problem site into something beautiful”.
It was clear that her ‘Woodland Garden’ was full of shade-loving bulbs, perennials and shrubs planted underneath what was a dense, dark canopy of tall oaks. And yet they grew and grew well, creating an atmosphere of peace and tranquility.
With this in mind, this is a book that you can sit down and read from cover to cover and know that it will contain great advice. It follows the course of the seasons, starting in Spring (with snowdrops, aconites and daffodils awakening the garden) and ending in the “depths of winter” (with bonfires and brilliant stems), creating a natural flow to the discussion. It is a lovely book and well worth reading in and of itself, as well as for a reference as to what is possible.
The book first came out in 2002 under the name Beth Chatto’s Woodland Garden and the latest edition is a revised and updated version of this classic book. It also contains extensive full colour photographs by Steve Wooster, who has been photographing the garden for over 20 years.
Beth Chatto’s Shade Garden: Shade-loving plants for year-round interest, by Beth Chatto, Pimpernel Press Ltd, London (2017), 231 pages (Hardback), ISBN 978-1-9102-5822-4
