HISTORY OF GARDENING

Revolutionary landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll

combined horticulture and art

By Lee Robbins

GERTRUDE JEKYLL, one of the 20th century’s most important pioneering landscape designers, was an exemplar and champion of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The Arts and Crafts Movement of the second half of the 19th century was a reaction against the formality and rigidity of the Victorian period and the impersonal mechanization brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The philosophical underpinnings of the movement, developed by John Ruskin (1819-1900), who promulgated the idea that nature and art should be expressed by people and not through mechanization, and movement founder William Morris (1834-1896), who promoted the value of individual craftsmanship and the beauty of nature, provided the foundational principles and ideals that influenced Jekyll and her garden designs.

Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) was a powerful influence in the English Arts and Crafts Movement, creating artful designs in gardens and landscaping. She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of articles and dozens of books on gardens and gardening. She promoted colour design theory in garden planning and published the book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (1908).

Her signature graceful garden paths were softened by naturalistic herbaceous borders in direct contrast to the very formal “carpet-bedding” schemes favoured in Victorian gardens, made popular during the Gardenesque style of the 1830s, where each plant was separated from the others with very clean edges for the beds and arranged geometrically to produce a tapestry effect.

Jekyll used mostly perennials rather than the annuals and tropical plants fashionable in extravagant Victorian

“bedding-out” designs which stressed exuberance of colour and exotic varieties that had to be replaced when their colour was spent.

Jekyll used her formal training as an artist to combine horticulture with art. She incorporated colour-theory and mixed plants and textures to achieve unique shades and contrasts producing lush and brilliant garden collages. Jekyll’s favoured approach was to compose a plant border that started with cool colours, moved to hot ones and then receded to the cooler ones again. Her use of large drifts of native hardy perennial plants in her garden designs was revolutionary. Her gardens were designed with plants carefully selected to bloom throughout the year, flowing from one season to the next: early spring to autumn.

Jekyll worked on more than 100 garden projects with Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), a famous and influential British architect. Their work was an Arts and Crafts blend where the design of the house and the garden were both considered as essential components, complementing and flowing into each other, rather than viewed as separate entities. One of their most well-known projects is Hestercombe, a garden near Taunton, Somerset, open to the public, known for its textures in stone and plantings.

Gertrude Jekyll was one of the 20th century’s most important British landscape designers and writers. She was a horticulturist, garden designer, photographer, writer and artist, a true “Renaissance Woman”. At her death, she had designed hundreds of gardens over a period of 40 years. Jekyll’s planting schemes and their harmonious colour palettes remain the quintessential essence of cottage garden style. Her gardens and writings are still a source of inspiration today.

From the Library

A few books from the Weston Family Library to give you more in-depth information about Gertrude Jekyll and the Arts and Crafts Movemwent are:

1. Richard Bisgrove: The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll. Call No: SB 470.J45 Bis 1992

2. Judith B. Tankard: Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement Call No. SB 454.3.A76.Tan 2004

3. Judith B. Tankard: Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden (from the Archives of Country Life) Call No. SB 470.J45 Tan 2011