Last week I visited Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex. The garden is still unfurling from winter. The relative starkness allowed me to see the structure of things – abrupt protrusions of solitary flowers, endless variations of upward thrust followed by rapid or creeping submission to gravity. Last year’s gunnera was an abject crepey mass with scrunches of new green leaf. There were many varieties of hellebore and narcissi, fragile bells of the fritillaries and lovely grapey