Jekyll, Gertrude

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Jekyll, Gertrude (1843–1932). English garden-designer and writer. She is particularly remembered for her books on horticulture (she was profoundly influenced by William Robinson) and for the various gardens she planned with Lutyens (whom she first met in 1889, and was instrumental in introducing the budding architect to his first clients). Lutyens designed Munstead Wood, Surrey (1896–9), for her, where, prompted by her Arts-and-Crafts background (she knew Ruskin), she laid out a cottage-style garden of old-fash-ioned flowers, doing away with carpet-bed-ding, topiary-work, box-edging, and so on, in favour of a completely informal approach. She made the herbaceous border famous, and she herself became a household name, not least through her influential Wood and Garden (1899—  illustrated with her own photographs). She designed some 300 gardens, about 100 of them with Lutyens (good examples of which were Deanery Garden, Sonning, Berks. (1899–1901), Orchards, Munstead, near Godalming, Surrey (1897–9), and Hestercombe, Taunton, Som. (1903–6) ). One of her best gardens, designed independently of Lutyens, was Barrington Court, Som. (1916–17).

Bibliography

Bisgrove (1992);
J. Brown (1982, 1986, 1996);
Journal of Garden History, ii/3 (July–Sept. 1982), 285–92;
Tooley (ed.) (1994)

A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture JAMES STEVENS CURL

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Gertrude Jekyll

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