Be sure to check opening times. Some garden visits may need to be pre-booked
Many great gardens have inauspicious beginnings. When Beth Chatto and her fruit-farmer husband Andrew first arrived here at Elmstead Market in the early 1960s, what has become the Beth Chatto Gardens was just a piece of wasteland surrounded a few miles north of Leeds. Often hailed as one of the finest small gardens in the country, it was acquired by amateur gardeners Frederick and Sybil Spencer in 1951. At the time, it was nothing but a house surrounded by farmland, but with remarkable skill, Frederick and Sybil (and later their son Robin, who was responsible for much of the garden’s design) used hard landscaping, topiary and carefully placed hedges to give the garden its strong architectural elements and bone structure. Strongly influenced by Arts and Crafts gardens such as Hidcote, they divided the one acre into a series of interlinked garden rooms, and added focal points and vistas.
