Gertrude Jekyll

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Gertrude Jekyll (November 29, 1843–December 8, 1932), was an influential British garden designer, writer, and artist who created over 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and the USA. She also contributed over 1,000 articles to Country Life, The Garden and other magazines.

Gertrude Jekyll was born at 2 Grafton Street, London, the fifth of the seven children of Captain Edward JH Jekyll, an officer in the Grenadier Guards and his wife Julia Hammersley. Her younger brother, the Reverend Walter Jekyll was a personal friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed the family name for his famous novella. In 1848 her family left London and moved to Bramley House in Surrey where Jekyll (properly pronounced JEE-kul, to rhyme with 'treacle') spent her formative years.

Jekyll, a rotund, bespectacled spinster, should be more correctly categorized as a planter than as a "designer". She did indeed design, but did it through her plantings rather than traditional design aspects. She also 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, Sir Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes, and by whom her home Munstead Wood was designed. (In 1900, Lutyens and Jekyll's brother Hubert designed the British Pavilion for the Paris Exposition.) Jekyll is not remembered for her outstanding designs but instead for her subtle, painterly approach to the arrangement of the gardens she created, particularly her herbaceous borders. Her work is known for its radiant color and the brush-like strokes of her plantings; the Impressionistic-style schemes may have had something to do with Jekyll's deteriorating eyesight, which largely put an end to her career as a painter and watercolorist.

Jekyll was one of the first of her profession to take into account the color, texture, and experience of gardens as the prominent authorities in her designs, and she was a life-long fan of plants of all genres. Her theory of how to design with colour was influenced by JMW Turner and by Impressionism. Later in life, Jekyll collected and contributed a vast array of plants solely for the purpose of preservation to numerous institutions across Britain. This pure passion for gardening was started at South Kensington School of Art, where she fell in love with the creative art of planting, and even more specifically, gardening. At the time of her death, she had designed over 400 gardens in Britain, Europe and even a few in North America. All were known for their meticulous attention to color detail, and the lack of consideration to fads of the day like the angular modernist gardens that were popular, to a degree, in England and France in the 1920s. This characteristic of "going against the grain" is a large part of the reason that Jekyll is remembered today.

Jekyll was not only an inspiring garden designer, but is also known for her prolific writing. She penned over fifteen books, ranging from Wood and Gardening to memoirs of her youth. Jekyll did not want to limit her influence to teaching the practice of gardening, but to take it a step further to the quiet study of gardening and the plants themselves.

In 1986, the rose breeder David Austin created a deep-pink, old-fashioned-style shrub rose and named it in Jekyll's honour . A cross between Austin's own 'Wife of Bath' and the Portland rose 'Comte de Chambord,' it won, in 2002, the James Mason award from the Royal National Rose Society. 'Gertrude Jekyll' also received, in 1993, a Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit.

Jekyll later returned to her childhood home in the village of Bramley, Surrey to design a garden in Snowdenham Lane.

Jekyll is often seen in photographs wearing one of a series of somewhat eccentric hats.

[edit] See also

• Garden design
• Planting design
• History of gardening

There are many Gertrude Jekyll gardens across the South East of England.

[edit] External links

• The Gertrude Jekyll Estate
• 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)
• Jekyll garden in Woodbury CT, USA
• Gertrude Jekyll's garden designs @ Ward's Book of Days
• Times Obituary
• Detailed family history