A Piece about Gertrude Jekyll
By Delagah Dadbeh
To celebrate great Women in Landscape Architecture, the ExA Grafters Group are looking at the professional life and achievements of Gertrude Jekyll, one of the most notable British horticulturists and garden designers.
Born in 1843 in London, Jekyll spent most of her life in Surrey, England and later at Munstead Wood, Godalming, where she established her garden centre and bred many new plants. She is well-known for her influence on garden design through creating many gardens across the UK, Europe, and North America; publishing over fifteen valuable books on garden and planting design; and contributing over 1000 articles to gardening magazines.
Her approach to landscape architecture and garden design was influenced by the Arts and Crafts principles and movement. She studied culture, habit, foliage, and the colour of plants, as well as forming a meaningful relationship with the context, whilst also creating a picturesque and natural appearance in the gardens she designed.
Gertrude Jekyll’s gardens, many of which are now restored and open to visitors, were a break from the formality of Victorian gardens and brought in a freedom of choice, as well as a wider use of plants. Her garden creations reveal unexpected views and pictorial surprises. She approached the design of gardens like paintings; this is said to be a result of seeing colours as blurs due to an eye condition she was diagnosed with in her 50s, when she decided to focus her work on garden design.
Jekyll was a business savvy woman who successfully delivered 400 gardens, about a hundred of which involved some collaboration with the prominent English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In fact, she was a mentor to young Lutyens, commissioning him to design her own house and helping him define his style. Later, she became a sponsor of Lutyens’s work, introducing him to a network of major clients for whom she also designed large scale gardens that grabbed a lot of attention.
She was also quick in embracing merchandising opportunities, such as designing her own range of glass flower vases, and breeding a relatively extensive list of plants, which she was selling as ‘surplus plants’ to provide for the majority of her gardens’ softscape and fund her gardening team at the same time. She was a true lifestyle influencer whose garden designs, along with Lutyens’ houses, were widely sought after across Surrey and elsewhere.
Original drawings and sketches of Gertrude Jekyll are kept in University of California, Berkeley, while Godalming Museum has many of her notebooks and copies of all her garden drawings. In her style of garden design, she is remembered for her hardy flower borders, with emphatic drifts of colours and shades ranging from greys and greens to striking, radiant colours. Her modern use of “warm” and “cool” flower colours in gardens is also delineated in her theoretical works such as her book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (reprinted 1988).
Jekyll was associated and spent a lot of time with many progressive women from an early age, leading to trips that inspired and improved her career, getting commissioned by a number of these women to design their gardens and being introduced to prominent horticulturists of her time. She was equally supportive of other women to develop their career, being a patron of the Glynde School for Lady Gardeners, started by Lady Frances Wolseley in 1902. Jekyll was also active in suffrage movement; although never supporting the militant strategies of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she designed a banner for Godalming’s National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), with shamrocks, roses and thistles symbolising support from women across the land.
