The Beth Chatto Gardens
On my first visit to the Beth Chatto Gardens back in the mid 1990’s I was totally overwhelmed, entirely uneducated as a gardener and unfamiliar with the vast array of plants on display. All these years later, the gardens are like an old friend. Each visit marking the passing of seasons and years but on each visit there’s something new to find, a gem of a plant previously unnoticed, one which just has to find a place in our own garden.
In 2006, I contacted the gardens with a request to photograph out of hours only to find that Beth Chatto was only working with one photographer at the time. Of course the gardens at that point were Beth’s private garden space as well as a public affair.
So it is that after a 17 year wait, my long held ambition came to fruition; an out of hours photography visit to the Beth Chatto Gardens. No thought this time of shooting photos for sale but this time with my local Tollesbury Photography Group, to be engrossed in a quiet private space that I have only experienced during busy days.
Huge thanks to Ben Field and the team at the Beth Chatto Gardens for enabling this truly amazing experience! Oh and I did find another plant that has to be in our garden, Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’.
