An inspirational figure in the gardening world, Beth Chatto is renowned for her diverting, instructive books as well as her famous, informal garden in Essex, The Beth Chatto Gardens.

Chatto started the nursery and garden in 1960, on a patch of wasteland that had been part of her husband’s fruit farm.

Undaunted by the poor  soil conditions, which ranged from ‘starved gravel to soggy bog’, Beth took her lead from nature and worked with what she had rather than trying to create a garden blueprint. Her ecological approach, which was deeply unfashionable at the time, encouraged a generation of gardeners to work with the prevailing conditions and to explore naturalistic planting.

When the nursery decided to relocate the visitor’s car park, Beth was faced with a new challenge - how to create a garden from a compacted, grass parking lot built on a gravel pit.  With her knack of turning problems into assets, she resolutely introduced plants so well suited to the tough conditions that she has never had to feed, stake or artificially water them and The Gravel Garden is now renowned world wide.

By introducing plant ecology to garden design, Beth Chatto transformed garden making but the real pleasure, she told the Telegraph recently, was simply to be a gardener in a long chain of other gardeners. ‘Our time is so ephemeral, and no one can say how long any garden will last. It is being part of that continuous chain, passing on plants and the love of plants from generation to generation, that matters.’

Read More or listen to a BBC Radio 4 interview