Gertrude Jekyll - a passionate garden creator
Gertrude Jekyll was a Victorian-born passionate garden designer, painter, photographer and author. She created some 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and America; and her influence on garden design during her life was highly significant, and indeed, remains so today.
Born in 1843, Jekyll spent most of her life in Surrey, latterly at Munstead Wood, Godalming. She ran a garden centre there and bred many new plants. Some of her gardens have been faithfully restored, wholly or partly, and can be visited. A number are attached to equally interesting houses. Godalming Museum has many of her notebooks and copies of all her garden drawings, (compiled and sorted by members of the Surrey Gardens Trust); the original drawings are in the University of California, Berkeley.
Her books about gardening are widely read and collected in both their original and modern editions, and much has been written about her by others. She contributed over 1,000 articles to the magazines Country Life, The Garden and others. A talented painter, photographer, designer and craftswoman; she was much influenced by Arts & Crafts principles that were at their height during her adult life. She died in 1932.
Her brother, Walter, was a friend of the author, Robert Louis Stevenson; his name may have been borrowed for the title of his famous Jekyll & Hyde story. Gertrude Jekyll is well known for her association with the leading English architect of her period Sir Edwin Lutyens; and she collaborated with him on gardens for many of his houses he designed. The "Lutyens-Jekyll" garden overflowed with hardy shrubbery and herbaceous plantings within a firm classicising architecture of stairs and balustraded terraces. This combined style of the formal with the informal, exemplified by brick paths, softened by billowing herbaceous borders, full of lilies, lupins, delphiniums, and lavender was in direct contrast to the very formal bedding schemes favoured by the previous generation in the Victorian era. This new "natural" style was to define the "English garden" until modern times.
Amongst the gardens now open to the public designed or influenced by Gertrude Jekyll are Gravetye Manor near East Grinstead in Sussex, Loseley Park near Guildford in Surrey; Sissinghurst in Kent, Knebworth House in Hertfordshire and RHS Wisley.
Further reading
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