To today's eyes, this book looks old-fashioned, even boring. Don't be fooled. Chatto was the first gardener to popularise "ecological" gardening - grouping plants by their natural habitat, and suiting them to the habitats your garden has to offer. This modest handbook will still prove exceptionally useful to anyone gardening on thin, dry soils.
The first half of the book is devoted to Chatto's excellent advice on getting the best results from dry soil, enlivened with anecdotes about her own experimants and solutions, and interspersed with planting schemes for various situations - designs are given for an open sunny island bed, for instance, and then for a dry shady one. Chatto describes how she grows her own plants, and which have done best in different positions. Her style is relaxed, informal and very easy to read.
The second half of the book is an alphabetical list of suitable plants, with descriptions and suggestions for their best place in the garden. The index at the back helps you find mentions of particular plants in the first part.
I have the 1981 edition, and the real drawback of this is a lack of the kind of illustrations we take for granted today. There are line drawings of the planting schemes, and a modest number of black and white photos, very little help. However the book is so well researched and well written, it is worth reading it with a pictorial reference like the RHS encyclopaedia by one's side.