Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden, From the Archives of Country Life
by Judith B. Tankard
Aurum Press Ltd, UK, hardcover, 192 pages, May 2011, ISBN: 9781845136246; ISBN-10: 1845136241, list price $45.00.
Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood
Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) enjoys a status in garden history neither equaled nor excelled by another woman in her lifetime, in the century preceding her birth, or in the long years of the twentieth century following her death. She walked into garden history in 1875 when she called on William Robinson (1838-1935), editor of The Garden, at his office in Covent Garden. She was soon writing botanical notes for the magazine, first above the initials "G. J.," and in 1881 as "G. Jekyll, Munstead, Godmaling." William Robinson returned her visit, traveling in 1880 to Munstead House in Surrey, where Miss Jekyll lived with her Mother from 1876 to her death in 1895. The garden at Munstead House, conceived and planted by Gertrude Jekyll under the influence of Robinson's The Wild Garden (1870), enthralled Mr. Robinson. Some two years later William Goldring, the assistant editor of The Garden, extolled her accomplishment in an article, "Never before have we seen hardy plants set out so well or cultivated in such a systematic way." He continued his praise describing the Munstead House border as "the richest and most effective border of hardy flowers that we know of near London." The die was cast. Gertrude Jekyll was launched on a career as a plantswoman, landscape gardener, and writer whose output was prolific and long-lived, ending a half-century later with her death on 8 December 1932. William Robinson attended her funeral. He followed her to rest on 7 May 1935.
The tribute to her genius came quickly. H. Avray Tipping (1855-1933), her long time friend and a fellow writer for the magazine Country Life, penned an immediate tribute.
Who of us that are gardeners to-day have not profited by the experience and teaching of this entirely capable woman, easily efficient in all she set out to know and to do? She opened our eyes to the possibilities of the herbaceous border, of the woodland garden, of the bulb-set glade. . . . She was no mere theorist but a practical worker (and) her books are the fruits of long experience, critically treated and plainly set forth. Francis Jekyll's biography of his aunt, Gertrude Jekyll: A Memoir, was published in 1934. Reprints of her books followed.
While two World Wars claimed many of her gardens and their gardeners, her essential influence survived on the printed page. Gardeners and writers have turned since to the dozen important garden books she wrote (two with co-authors Lawrence Weaver and Christopher Hussey), over 100 articles and horticultural notes that appeared above her name in Country Life, a similar, if not larger, number published in other magazines and journals, the records of some 250 garden design projects preserved in the archives of the University of California at Berkeley, and the luminescent photographs of Munstead Wood and other houses and gardens made by Charles Latham that appeared in Country Life from 1898 until 1912. A renaissance in Jekyll studies, amounting to nothing short of a deserved hagiography, began in 1982 with Jane Brown's Gardens of a Golden Afternoon, The Story of a Partnership: Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll; it has continued to the present work, Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden, From the Archives of Country Life, written by Judith B. Tankard. Gertrude Jekyll's books were reprinted in the 1980s by both the Ayer Company in this country and the Antique Collectors Club in England. Others have written of her life, her gardens, and the Edwardian age in which they flourished. Miss Tankard contributed to this resurgence at an early date, in 1989, when her (and co-author Michael Van Valkenburgh's) Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood was published. She joined forces with Martin Wood in the production of Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood (1996).
For Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden, Miss Tankard turned to the archives of the magazine Country Life that was founded in 1897 by Edward Hudson (1858-1936) for whom Miss Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens collaborated at Deanery Garden and Lindisfarne Castle. She marshals this important collection as the basis of five essays titled after those of five of Gertrude Jekyll's books: Home and Garden, Gardens Old and New, Gardens for Small Country Houses, Colour in the Flower Garden, and Garden Ornament. These are illustrated by both black and white period photographs and contemporary color views. The first of these five chapters, "Home and Garden," is devoted entirely, rightly to an account of Munstead Wood and features five autochromes of the garden and its borders that record the extraordinary colorations crafted by Miss Jekyll. Another star in this series is Miss Tankard's treatment of the gardens at The Manor House, Upton Grey, which have been brilliantly restored by the present owners utilizing the original plans preserved at Berkeley. "Doing so," the author writes, "they have created one of the most authentic of all the Jekyll restorations." (Her account of the garden and the splendid photographs by Paul Barker are the basis of a short article on the garden, "Unravelling Jekyll's riddle," that appeared in the 21 September issue of Country Life.)
Judith Tankard opens this most recent study of Gertrude Jekyll with a short, elegant sketch of her life illustrated with a reproduction of William Nicholson's 1921 portrait of the gardener and photographs of three distinguished friends: Edward Hudson, H. Avray Tipping, and Sir Edwin Lutyens. Her collaborations with Lutyens, who designed Munstead Wood, produced some of the most remarkable country houses and gardens of the early twentieth century. He, arguably, knew her as well or better than any of the host of colleagues and clients they counted as friends. On the stone he designed for her grave his inscription is concise, remembering her simply, as Judith Tankard notes, as "Artist, Gardener, Craftswoman."
