Weekly catch up with garden & propagation

Propagation Team

We started the day with a "feels like" temperature of -6! Yet despite the chilly blast, this week, down in propagation we've been hot on it!

The team has been out in full force on our nursery, preparing our sale plants for the colder damper months ahead. Many of our varities come inside for the winter season, but our more hardy cohort brave it outside. A catered cutting back, root check and a fresh mulch gives these plants a little boost for what lies ahead.

Elsewhere, the team have been bringing Christmas to Beth Chatto's. Some of you might be aware we have a Christmas market this saturday (22/11/2025) and decorations are flying up around the place in preparation. Emily and Asa have built some beautiful natural garlands, which are now adorning the tearoom pillars. Annie and Emily then created some stunning posies, where Rob shimmied up a ladder to place onto our Christmas tree. We hope you'll all enjoy seeing these when visiting over the coming weeks.

Ned and Pete have been continuing their project of overhauling the propagation house, where our cuttings are nurtured until they're ready to be potted on. They're doing a brilliant job and Debs is itching to see the benefits that their work has achieved early next year.

As always, thank you for your continued orders! If we don't see you at the market this Saturday, hopefully many of you will pop by before Christmas, where you can witness the sepia magic of the late autumn sun upon Beth's garden.

Garden Team

It's been a really exciting week in the garden. We started the renovation work on two of the borders that sit on the edge of the main Reservoir Garden. The idea being that, in time, both of these beds will have a more cohesive feel with the wider reservoir garden area as we develop it over the coming years.

The first bed we tackled was the large, circular bed that sits between the Reservoir and Scree Gardens. This bed has one or two dead trees, some overgrown shrubs, plus lots and lots of bramble that needed to be dealt with as a starting point. So we got digging, putting aside anything we wanted to keep, then a combination of hand shearing, electric strimming and long handled hedge cutters did the bulk of the work. We'll keep this area cut short over winter and let the many bulbs come through in spring, then we'll gradually develop the new planting as time moves forward.

The second bed, on the slope that leads up from the Water Garden into the Reservoir Garden came next. This posed a different challenge from the first bed and it also has a longer term plan. This bed is full of alkanet, a deep rooted, quickly spreading plant that dominated the space and smothered the competition. Removing this successfully is difficult so we made the tough decision to cover the area with mypex membrane and then bark over the top. The plan is to suppress all the growth as it sits in place, whilst we work elsewhere. When ready, we can remove everything and plant this area fresh. The plus side to this process is we can reuse both the bark and mypex in other parts of the garden as we need it.

It's been hard work, but we are so pleased with the results. We can't wait to watch this area develop over the months and years ahead.