Gertrude Jekyll (1843 - 1932)

Gertrude Jekyll digging a Sunflower, Edwin Lutyens, 1897, c. Dr. Jane Ridley

Gertrude Jekyll was born into a wealthy and well-connected upper middle class family.  She spent her formative years painting and travelling and mixed in intellectual circles which included John Ruskin, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stephenson.  She knew the painters Hercule Brabazon, Lord Leighton, George Watts and Sir Edward Poynter, and through her sister-in-law Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt.  Through a close friend she knew George Eliot and Florence Nightingale, and counted Princess Louise – daughter of Queen Victoria – as a friend whose company she enjoyed on holidays in the Swiss mountains.

She was also very accomplished: not only in painting, but singing, embroidery (she designed textiles for the Duke of Westminster), jewellery, metalwork, woodwork and the new craze of photography. 

During her travels she was fascinated by the Renaissance gardens of Italy and the Moorish gardens of Spain, but she also loved old British Gardens: “Some of the most delightful gardens” she wrote, were “the little strips in front of roadside cottages…where else can one see wallflowers, or double daisies, or white rose bushes; such clustering masses of perennial peas, or such well-kept flowery edgings of pink, or thrift, or London pride?”

Jekyll knew her plants well and grew them in the borders of her mother’s house at Munstead Heath, and then later in her own garden at Munstead Wood, before she would recommend them in a design. Her hardy flower borders were planted by mixing shrubs with perennials, bulbs and annuals – a radical change from earlier massed formal plantings of similar species. 

In her first book Wood and Garden (1899) she alluded to the difficulties that she faced in her new approach to planting: ‘My visitor had lately got the idea that he liked hardy flowers, though he had scarcely thrown off the influence of some earlier heresy which taught that they were more or less contemptible – the sort of thing for cottage gardens; still as they were now in fashion, he thought he had better have them...  We were passing along my flower border (when he said) “I told my fellow last autumn to get anything he liked, and yet it is perfectly wretched.  It is not as if I wanted anything out of the way… I only want a lot of common things like that”, waving a hand airily at my precious border, while scarcely taking the trouble to look at it.’

When she met Lutyens it was a partnership made in heaven.  He was a fellow admirer of the Arts and Crafts movement with a fondness for traditional materials.  He was at the start of his career and needed introductions (to the circle she was a part of) – and she needed an outlet where her designs and plantings could be taken seriously. He would design the hard elements, the geometric structure, whilst Jekyll’s plantings would soften them.

Herbaceous Border Munstead Wood, Helen Allingham, Bridgeman Art Gallery

Jekyll planted in drifts of colour with contrasting counterpoints. But most importantly, although she kept her artist’s touch she was practical and understood the plants: In her book Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) she wrote : “It seems to me that the duty we owe to our gardens and to our own bettering in our gardens is so to use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes, they should be always training those eyes to a more exalted criticism; to a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combination or any sort of misuse of plants, but in which it becomes a point of honour to be always striving for the best.”

She wrote 13 books and published over 1000 articles, particularly for The Garden, Gardening Illustrated and Country Life, and became a household name, but it was not until the publication of Francis Jekyll’s biography of his aunt in 1934 that the full extent of her private design commissions was revealed. In fact he lists some 340 projects. 

She was described in The Times obituary as a gardener and artist who brought about “the complete transformation of English horticultural method and design, and also the wide diffusion of knowledge and taste which has made us almost a nation of gardeners.  Miss Jekyll was also a true artist with an exquisite sense of colour”.