Beth Chatto's gravel garden

The world’s first dry gravel garden Beth Chatto is located in the UK, near the city of Colchester in Essex. The peculiarity of the gravel garden, founded in 1991, is that only drought-resistant plants grow in it, so the garden is almost never watered. The gravel garden is the most interesting site of the Beth Chatto Garden, founded in 1960.

The gravel garden delights the eye with walkways lined with light gravel, as well as a huge assortment of drought-resistant plants from Mediterranean countries and temperate zones, abundantly blooming from early spring to late autumn. Here you can admire various types of shrubs, bulbous and small-onioned plants, various types of decorative onions, yarrows, wormwood, vervain, badana, lavender, bells, cornflowers, decorative cereals: barley, hovels, peristoblastine, polevice and many other types of plants. The garden is decorated in landscape style.

In addition to the gravel garden, there is a water garden with four ponds and coastal and aquatic plants, as well as a forest garden where shade-loving and forest plants grow. There is also a rocky garden, where plants are collected that are suitable for alpine slides.