Glorious Gardens from Above episode 2 – Essex

Glorious Gardens from Above episode 2 - Essex

Glorious Gardens from Above episode 2 – Essex: Christine Walkden continues her airborne exploration of Britain’s gardens by dropping in on the county of Essex. At the Beth Chatto Gardens, Christine experiments with triangular planting and shares tea and cake with a gardening legend.


 

 



At RHS Hyde Hall, she shifts rocks with a former student, and it’s all aboard a vintage Thames sailing barge for a trip on the Blackwater Estuary.

 

Glorious Gardens from Above episode 2 – Essex

 

The Beth Chatto Gardens

Construction of the Beth Chatto Gardens, at Elmstead Market near Colchester, began in 1960 as a garden attached to the Chatto family home on land that had previously belonged to the Chatto family fruit farm. It had not been farmed as the soil was considered too dry in places, too wet in others and the whole area had been allowed to grow wild with blackthorn, willow and brambles. The only plants that survive from the earliest days are the ancient boundary oaks surrounding the Garden.

The Beth Chatto Gardens comprise a varied range of planting sites totalling 5 acres (2.0 ha), including dry, sun baked gravel, water and marginal planting, woodland, shady, heavy clay and alpine planting, and now include the Gravel Garden, Woodland Garden, Water Garden, Long Shady Walk, Reservoir Garden (redesigned by Head Gardener Asa Gregers-Warg and Garden and Nursery Director David Ward, with Beth’s input) and Scree Garden. It was the development of these sites that prompted Beth Chatto to write books on gardening with what could be considered as “problem areas” using plants that nature has developed to survive in differing conditions.

Beth Chatto lived in the white house in the midst of the gardens. She worked with her team on developing the Gardens and continued to inspect and approve their work until the day before she died. She contributed to articles for international and national press and appeared in international media.

RHS Garden Hyde Hall

RHS Garden Hyde Hall is a public display garden run by the Royal Horticultural Society in the English county of Essex. It is one of five public gardens run by the Society, alongside Wisley in Surrey, Harlow Carr in North Yorkshire, Rosemoor in Devon, and Bridgewater in Greater Manchester.

The 360 acre Hyde Hall site encompasses a range of garden styles, from the Dry Garden with drought resistant plants, to the Hilltop Garden with roses and herbaceous borders. Hyde Hall has had a lot of investment in recent years with the opening of a new Global Growth Vegetable Garden (in 2017) showing vegetables from around the world, a new Winter Garden (in 2018) hosting an RHS Trial of Cornus, a new Welcome building (in 2017), and Hilltop Complex (in 2018) featuring a new restaurant and activity centre.

 

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