Quietly Moving the Earth-Women in the Garden #5-Gertrude Jekyll (1840-1932) "the Fat and the Grumbly"
Oh, my, what a comment describing the one and only, Aunt Bumps. Vita Sackville-West met Gertrude Jekyll, in her later years, and described her thus, and yet, Vita was certainly influenced by Jekyll and asked advice for her own gardens at Sissinghurst.
Pronounced...Jeeeeekyll, Ms. Jeykll with the long E made a lasting contribution to the world of gardening. She knew the principal players of the literature, art and the architectural Olympus of her era or better said, her movement, as she was a keen believer in the Edwardian, Arts and Crafts Movement.
When I started this smallish series on women as earth movers, I was thinking about...well, flowers and gardens. But, the more I "dug," the more I saw polymaths who shifted the thinking of their day not just in the garden but in politics and the Humanities at large.
Gertrude Jekyll initially set out to become a painter. She was educated at home, like Agatha Christie and the Mitford sisters...and others we have known and loved.
It wasn't unusual for a girl of a certain class to be schooled at home in the Victorian era. But it was unusual for a woman to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1865 at the age of 23, after formally studying art for five years. That same year she painted her interesting Jehu Driving Furiously, an arresting, complex work showing a horse-drawn chariot galloping head on towards the viewer. This picture, exhibited at the Society of Female Artists, was noted by Ruskin, and is now to be seen at the Museum of Garden History in Lambeth. The painting is Victorian in theme but captures an individual vitality that becomes the hallmark of her life...Galloping straight in...Vita, stand back.
As you can see from the painting above, her style becomes softly painterly as she moves into the Edwardian era. A designer and horticulturalist, she planted as she painted. She is credited more than 400 gardens in England, Europe and North America, designed in a naturalist style of planting that, previously, was only found in England.
After being diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition (myopia) in 1891 at the age of 50, Jekyll gave up painting and needlework and focused on garden design. It is then that she initiated an informal partnership with a young architect with architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, the famous Arts and Crafts builder, who was 26 years her junior. Munstead Wood (Grade I listed), Jekyll’s house, was their first collaboration.
Together, they traveled in the dynamic circle of William Morse. "She gave him access to her social circle as clients, and supplied distinctive planting schemes for many of his gardens."
In 1877, she moved into her newly built property, Munstead House, near Godalming in Surrey. Here, she laid out new gardens, attracting the attention of William Robinson, editor of ‘The Garden’, for which Jekyll became a contributor.
Robinson, author of ‘The Wild Garden’ (1870), was a leading proponent of naturalistic garden design in opposition to popular, highly formal Victorian schemes.
Lutyens house with a Jekyll garden became the ‘must-have’ of the cultured English Edwardian. Their work was often featured in Robinson's magazine.
Lutyens designed the residence, and set it in the gardens that Jeykll had already created for herself and her mother. Writes a keen-eyed Wikipedia source, “This combined style, of the formal with the informal, was captured in brick paths, herbaceous borders, and with plants such as lilies, lupins, delphiniums and lavender."
True to her principles, she ensured the house and garden features were built from the local Bargate stone, with simple sand paths between the borders.
In addition to her other talents, Jekyll was a prolific writer and gifted photographer who wrote countless magazine articles and more than 15 books. Among the best-known are Colour Schemes in the Flower Garden, Home and Garden, and Wood and Garden.
At a very early age, she came to love plants. She says she “wanted to know about them; but had no one to tell me…But I got to know them as friends long before I could find out what their names were.” She recounts her “delight in the pure blue” of “beautiful water forget-me-nots,” and “the small quiet smell of the little wild pansy that you find in cornfields among the stubble.” She was also especially attracted by dandelions, much to the annoyance of her nanny, nurse Marson, who said “they were Nasty Things.” This same energetic, child was the bane of her mother's existence. Her father called her a ‘queer fish’; she infuriated her mother by "clumping through the best rooms of their Surrey country house in her gardening boots."
In 1911’s Colour Schemes in the Flower Garden, Jekyll writes, “I am strongly of the opinion that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be in themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention. Merely having them, or having them planted unassorted in garden spaces, is only like having a box of paints from the best colourman, or, to go one step further, it is like having portions of these paints set out upon a palette. This does not constitute a picture; and 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 . . . It is just in the way it is done that lies the whole difference between commonplace gardening and gardening that may rightly claim to rank as a fine art. . . . In practice it is to place every plant or group of plants with such thoughtful care and definite intention that they shall form a part of a harmonious whole, and that successive portions, or in some cases even single details, shall show a series of pictures. . . . it is to be always watching, noting and doing, and putting oneself meanwhile into closest acquaintance and sympathy with the growing things.”
She does wax on...but, she sounds sensible and I want to think she would have been a trail blazer in favor of native plants, in light of climate change, if she was alive today
32 of Jekyll’s gardens are protected in the ‘Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest’, including those she carried out in partnership with Lutyens.
Many are gone or private. Gardens morph and either endure or are forgotten but a fair body of her work exists and would make a lovely theme for a trip to England.
Lutyens" beloved "Aunt Bumps" died in December 1932. Her tombstone in Busbridge Churchyard, designed by Lutyens, is inscribed: 'In remembrance of Herbert and Gertrude Jekyll long time dwellers in their homes in Munstead. Her brother, Herbert, passed away the previous autumn. "Their joy was in the work of their hands: their memorial is the beauty which lives after them."
Her obituary in The Times recorded that she did not cease ‘to share widely the fruits of her long and loving apprenticeship to Nature’.
What a great life story of a talented woman.
Amazing woman--and of course I want to know more and more and more.