beth chatto: a life with plants

Beth Chatto’s professional archive was one of the first to be donated to the newly extended Garden Museum at Lambeth in 2017.

correspondence, stock books, seed lists, and her handwritten book manuscripts (she never learned to type) together with the subsequent typescripts, heavily marked with her edits and revisions.

Most important were her private diaries, a near complete run from 1963 into the 1990s, and her travel notebooks. Throughout her working life, although with some gaps, Beth kept a daily diary and detailed notebooks on her later trips abroad. Her diaries range from tiny pocket books in the 1960s to large foolscap size by the 1990s. But they always had one page per day with her notes on the weather scribbled at the top, often her supper menu at the bottom, and in between, all the day’s events, from plants she had propagated to when – and by whom – she had had her hair permed. Her handwriting was always elegant, although the

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