Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll ( ; 29 November 1843 – 8 December 1932) was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by British and American gardening enthusiasts. Gertrude’s education was at home, but it included meeting various well-known figures such as Michael Faraday and Felix Mendelssohn. She started sketching and gardening at Bramley House, and in 1861 she went to the National School of Art, South Kensington. Her paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Society of Female Artists. In 1863, she went with Charles and Mary Newton to Greece and Turkey, which stimulated a life-long interest in Mediterranean plants.

Her siblings were also interested gardeners – her sister Caroline in Italy and her younger brother, Walter Jekyll, in Jamaica. Walter, sometime Minor Canon of Worcester Cathedral and Chaplain of Malta, was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed the family name for his 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Career

In 1868 the Jekylls moved again, this time to Wargrave Hill, Berkshire. The following year, she got to know William Morris, and was profoundly influenced by his idea of the unity of the arts. During the 1870s, she turned her hand to all sorts of arts and crafts, from embroidering tablecloths to smithing gates, and designing both interiors and gardens. She also continued to collect plants during trips to the Mediterranean.

In 1881, Jekyll started writing for William Robinson’s magazine, The Garden. Following her father’s death in 1876, Gertrude’s mother commissioned a house in Munstead Heath near Godalming from John James Stevenson, Gertrude herself designing the garden. Jekyll, who never married, lived with her mother until 1895, when she built a house over the way. This was Munstead Wood, designed by Edwin Lutyens, the first of their house-and-garden collaborations. She established a nursery here, from which she supplied her garden designs. In 1904, Jekyll returned to her childhood home in the village of Bramley to design a garden for Millmead House in Snowdenham Lane.

Jekyll continued to write for various gardening magazines and journals, and for Country Life, and she published her first book, Wood and Garden, in 1899. In 1908, she published her best-seller, Colour in the Flower Garden. Jekyll was also interested in traditional cottage furnishings and rural crafts, and concerned that they were disappearing. Her book Old West Surrey (1904) records many aspects of 19th-century country life, with over 300 photographs taken by Jekyll herself.

Themes

Jekyll was one half of one of the most influential and historical partnerships of the Arts and Crafts movement, thanks to her association with the English architect Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes. (In 1900, Lutyens and Jekyll's brother Herbert designed the British Pavilion for the Paris Exposition.)

Jekyll is remembered for her outstanding designs and subtle, painterly approach to the arrangement of the gardens she created, particularly her "hardy flower borders". Her work is known for its radiant colour and the brush-like strokes of her plantings; it is suggested by some that the Impressionistic-style schemes may have been due to Jekyll's deteriorating eyesight, which largely put an end to her career as a painter and watercolourist. Her artistic ability had been evident when she was a child and she had trained as an artist, and she also collaborated with Minnie Walters Anson.

thumb|600px|center|Jekyll's plan of the main flower-border at Munstead

She was one of the first of her profession to take into account the colour, texture, and experience of gardens as aspects of her designs. Jekyll's theory of how to design with colour was influenced by painter J. M. W. Turner and by Impressionism, and by the theoretical colour wheel. Her focus on gardening began at South Kensington School of Art,

where she became interested in the creative art of planting, and more specifically, gardening.

Not wanting to limit her influence to teaching the practice of gardening, Jekyll incorporated in her work the theory of gardening and an understanding of the plants themselves. Her writing was influenced by her friend Theresa Earle who had published her "Pot-pourri" books. In works like Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (reprinted 1988) she put her imprint on modern uses of "warm" and "cool" flower colours in gardens. Her concern that plants should be displayed to best effect even when cut for the house, led her to design her own range of glass flower vases.

Later in life, Jekyll collected and contributed a vast array of plants solely for the purpose of preservation to numerous institutions across Britain. At the time of her death, she had designed over 400 gardens in Britain, Europe and a few in North America.

Gardens

thumb|208x208px|Durmast House and Gardens

From 1881, when she laid out the gardens for Munstead House, Jekyll provided designs or planned planting for some four hundred gardens. More than half were directly commissioned, but many were created in collaboration with architects such as Lutyens and Robert Lorimer. Jekyll designed the plans at Durmast House and Gardens and this has recently been restored, including a Summer House designed by Lutyens.

File:West_Rill_at_Hestercombe.jpg| The West Rill at Hestercombe Gardens, 1904

Image:Jekyll Manor House Border.jpg|Jekyll's restored long border at Upton Grey Manor House, Hampshire

File:Hestercombe; Lutyens designed bench.jpg| Hestercombe Gardens, the Lutyens-designed bench

File:Lindisfarne Castle and its Jekyll Garden - geograph.org.uk - 334038.jpg|Lindisfarne Castle

File:Hestercombe06.jpg|Hestercombe Gardens, borrowed scenery

</gallery>

Awards

Jekyll was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1897 and the Veitch Memorial Medal of the society in 1929. Also in 1929, she was given the George Robert White Medal of Honor of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

Death and burial

thumb|The [[Jekyll Memorial, Busbridge|Jekyll Memorial in Busbridge churchyard]]

Jekyll died on 8 December 1932 at her home, Munstead Wood, in Surrey.

Legacy

In 1907, Jekyll donated her collection of traditional household items and objects relating to "Old Surrey" to the Surrey Archaeological Society. Much of this donation is still on display at Guildford Museum. In 1911, the Corporation of Guildford built an extension to the museum to house the collection.

In 2023, the National Trust bought her home Munstead Wood through a private sale.

Books

Wood and Garden (Longmans, Green and Co., 1899).
Home and Garden (Longmans, Green and Co., 1900).
(with E. Mawley) Roses for English Gardens (London: Country Life, 1902).
Wall and Water Gardens (London: Country Life, 1902).
Lilies for English Gardens (London: Country Life, 1903).
(with illustrations by George S. Elgood) Some English Gardens (Longmans, Green & Co., 1904)
Old West Surrey (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904).
Colour in the Flower Garden (London: Country Life, 1908).
Annuals & Biennials (London: Country Life, 1916)
Children and Gardens (London: Country Life, 1908).
(with Lawrence Weaver) Gardens for Small Country Houses (London: Country Life, 1914).
Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (London: Country Life, 1919).
Old English Household Life (Batsford, 1925).

References

External links

The Gertrude Jekyll Estate
Restored Jekyll garden in Sandwich, Kent
Restored Jekyll garden at Upton Grey
Short biography of Jekyll from Emily Compost
Online text of Gertrude Jekyll's Colour schemes for the flower garden (1921)
Restored Jekyll garden at Durmast House, Burley, Hampshire, UK
Jekyll garden in Woodbury CT, USA
Gertrude Jekyll's garden designs @ Ward's Book of Days
The Times Obituary
A Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens garden in France (1898)
Detailed family history
Connection between Jekyll, Eden, Baring, Hammersley and Poulett-Thomson families
Jekyll (Gertrude) Collection, 1877–1931

Works by Gertrude Jekyll on the RHS Digital Collections website