WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

A respect for nature is at the heart of everything Beth Tarling does in her stunning garden on the exposed Cornish coast

- NATASHA GOODFELLOW

Beth Tarling doesn’t believe in waste. Having grown up close to her grandparents who ‘never threw away so much as a potato peel,’ this ethos of environmentalism has long been part of her psyche. As a teenager, watching Geoff Hamilton’s Cottage Gardens series and Harry Dodson’s The Wartime Kitchen and Garden with her grandmother made a deep impression but it was when she started collecting gardening books and magazines from the 1940s and 1950s that the message really hit home. ‘They’re still so relevant today – people talk about wanting to be environmentally friendly now but if we all just lived a bit more like they did, we’d be much better off.’

It was only natural that, when she and her husband Dan moved to this house in Gunwalloe, on Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula, five years ago, they would tackle the garden in a similar fashion. Instead of endless trips to the garden centre to fill up with plants in plastic pots, they took a slower, gentler approach much more in line with the ‘make do and mend’ spirit of her grandparents’ era. Over time, they built the raised beds themselves from old boards and used discontinued bricks at a local builders’ merchants for the paths. They scoured eBay and car boot sales for old tools and vintage terracotta pots, now filled with plants that Beth grows herself from cuttings or seeds, just as her grandparents did.