Explore Britain with! Gertrude Jeky

Explore Britain with! Gertrude Jekyll

This month Susannah Stapleton takes us on a very English garden tour with Gertrude Jekyll, the Arts and Crafts garden designer and writer.

Early influences

The artist-gardener, Gertrude Jekyll, was born on November 29, 1843 into a well-to-do family in Mayfair. When she was five, the family left London and moved to Surrey, where Gertrude became captivated by the landscape and cottages surrounding their Bramley home. This interest soon extended to a passion for traditional crafts. As well as her love of gardening and botany, Gertrude was skilled in an impressive array of arts including silversmithing, photography, woodwork, interior design and embroidery.

A number of Gertrude's early sketchbooks and photograph albums, along with many of her books and articles, can be viewed at the

Gertrude's first garden design commission was on a modest scale. In 1870, after replying to an advert in a magazine placed by a young boy from Rochdale, she designed a window box garden to bring a bit of the countryside to his urban landscape. She was later to work on an even smaller scale when she advised Lutyens in the 1920s on the "garden' for Queen Mary's Dolls' House, now on display at Windsor Castle out..

Meeting the architect Edwin Lutyens in 1889 was the turning point in Jekyll's career. Although she was a grumpy, myopic and somewhat antisocial fortysomething and he was a vibrant young man barely out of his teens, the pair hit it off immediately and soon developed a working relationship and friendship that was to last a lifetime.

Jekyll designed over 450 gardens during her long career, many to complement Lutyens' work, but the opportunities to see her designs in bloom are limited. This is partly due to the fact that she specialised in gardens for small country houses of the kind that remain in private ownership, but also because, as the horticulturally challenged amongst us will attest, plants have a habit of dying. Without dedicated upkeep according to her original designs, most of the gardens Gertrude created have changed beyond recognition. Fortunately, there are enough exceptions to keep a Jekyll garden hunter reasonably happy.

In search of Jekyll's gardens

The

Other National Trust must-sees are St John the Baptist church in out. nearby Busbridge. The inscription on her gravestone, which was designed by her friend, Lutyens, simply reads:

For Armchair Explorers

Judith Tankard and Michael Wood's

offers an informative and fascinating glimpse of Gertrude's private world. Alternatively, instant gratification is available at the University of California's Gertrude Jekyll Digitisation Project website out. which has a number of scanned images of her original design sketches and notes.

Gertrude Jekyll's workshop at Munstead Wood