Pioneering gravel and water gardens.
Beth Chatto took on a scrubby, overgrown fruit farm at Elmstead Market in 1960 and spent decades matching plants to its dry gravel and boggy hollows, a “right plant, right place” approach set out in her 1978 book The Dry Garden. The Gravel Garden, laid out in the 1990s on the old nursery car park, is never watered and became the garden’s most copied idea. Open most of the year with a nursery and tearoom; there’s an admission charge. Alresford station is a little over 2km north.
