Visiting Beth Chatto's garden
Some people won't go back to a place they loved as a child. What if the cavernous green darkness with a warren of tunnels in which you built a den and spent all day hidden from view is just a gap in a rather scrubby patch of rhododendron? What if the apple tree you climbed and watched the world from has been taken down and the field turned into a carpark? I felt a bit the same about going to Beth Chatto 's garden. Might it be better not to risk disappointment? I seem to have been reading Beth Chatto's books all my serious gardening life, from the time when the children were old enough for swings and footballs to be banned from the garden and the children sent to the park. What an innocent time that seems now. I suppose they must have been about nine years old, the same sort of age they were when they started going to school and the local shops by themselves. Would that happen now or would they be kept close to home with trampolines...