Jekyll, nature is the gardener’s best guide. There are also lessons to be learned from “the little cottage gardens that help make our English waysides the prettiest in the temperate world.” With epigrammatic succinctness she sums up perhaps better than anyone the deep satisfaction to be had from the physical enterprise of gardening. For her the purpose of such activity was to give “happiness and repose of mind, firstly and above all considerations, and to give it through the presentation of the best kind of pictorial beauty of flower and foliage that can be combined or invented.”
Fortunate is the gardener who has always lived in a garden, and lucky is the child who is given a plot to garden when still quite young. Jekyll’s charming book Children and Gardens (1908) begins on an autobiographical note: “Well do I remember the time when I thought there were two kinds of people in the world—children and grown-ups, and that the world really belonged to the children. And I think it is because I have been more or less a gardener all my life that I still feel like a child in many ways, although from the number of years I have lived I ought to know that I am quite an old woman.”
Drawing on her own experiences as a child, Jekyll segues from vivid recollections of her first gardening endeavors and her attraction to specific scenes of nature’s beauty found on youthful rambles to this kind of careful instruction:
I said I would tell you about plans. A plan is a map of a small space on a large scale—you will see what scale means presently. The plan shows what it represents as if you were looking at it from above. If you lie on a table on your stomach and look over the edge, and if exactly below your eyes there is a dinner-plate on the floor, you see the plate in plan.
Thus is the young gardener taught how to lay out a garden; in similar grandmotherly age-to-youth language, using her own diagrammatic sketches, she makes the rest of the ABCs of creating a garden and growing plants easy for a child to grasp.
For Jekyll, gardening is essentially an aesthetic enterprise. While she believed that acquiring knowledge of the qualities of various types of soil and mastering horticultural methods is an important part of the gardener’s education, she stressed the importance of training oneself to have “a good flower-eye.” Light plays an important role, as does seasonality, in the making of Jekyll’s garden pictures. And color and growing habit are all-important considerations. Here, for instance, is how she describes her half-acre plantation of azaleas: “The whites are planted at the lower and more shady end of the group; next come the yellows and pale pinks, and these are followed at a little distance by kinds whose flowers are of orange, copper, flame, and scarlet-crimson colourings; this strong-coloured group again softening off into the woodland by bushes of the common yellow Azalea pontica, and its variety with flowers of larger size and deeper colour.”
Dorothea and Dinah at Orchards. Children and Gardens by Gertrude Jekyll, 1908. Courtesy of Judith B. Tankard.
It is thus not surprising to learn that Jekyll was a painter before poor eyesight caused her to exchange her palette of pigments for one of plants. In Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) she continues to paint garden pictures with the same kind of compositional forethought as an artist who first sketches the outlines of a new work on canvas. To explain her design method, Jekyll illustrates the book with diagrams for various beds and borders. The originator of color themes, she depicts plans for a gold garden, an orange garden, a gray garden, a blue garden, and a green garden. In addition, she inserts between some of the pages foldout plans for other gardens at Munstead Wood, including her long main border, the September border of early Michaelmas daisies, the June iris border, and her hidden garden. Studying these we perceive how, in order to achieve a tapestrylike weave of tone and texture, her flower schemes appear as loosely sketched, overlapping dia gonal drifts. This approach to gardening is, of course, the antithesis of that of the Victorian gardeners who created precisely edged beds displaying showy annuals in patterned arrangements.
“Plan for the Hidden Garden” by Gertrude Jekyll. Colour in the Flower Garden, 1908.
Above all, it is movement through the garden, the alternation of scenes from sunny lawn to shady woodland, that makes Munstead Wood such a delightful sensory experience. Here is how we begin our walk in her woodland garden:
My house, a big cottage, stands facing a little to the east of south, just below the wood. The windows of the sitting-room and its outer door, which stands open in all fine summer weather, look up a straight wide grassy way, the vista being ended by a fine old Scotch Fir with a background of dark wood. This old Fir and one other, and a number in and near the southern hedge, are all that remain of the older wood which was Scotch Fir.
This green wood walk, being the widest and most important, is treated more boldly than the others—with groups of Rhododendrons in the region rather near the house, and for the rest only a biggish patch of the two North American Brambles, the white-flowered Rubus nutkanus, and the rosy R. odoratus. In spring the western region of tall Spanish Chestnuts, which begins just beyond the Rhododendrons, is carpeted with Poets’ Narcissus; the note of tender white blossom being taken up and repeated by the bloom-clouds of Amelanchier, that charming little woodland flowering tree whose use in such ways is so much neglected. Close to the ground in the distance the light comes with brilliant effect through the young leaves of a wide-spread carpet of Lily of the Valley, whose clusters of sweet little white bells will be a delight a month hence.
The Rhododendrons are carefully grouped for colour—pink, white, rose and red of the best qualities are in the sunniest part, while, kept well apart from them, near the tall chestnuts and rejoicing in their partial shade, are the purple colourings, of as pure and cool a purple as may be found among carefully selected ponticum seedlings and the few named kinds that associate well with them. . . .
Jekyll goes on to tell us how among the rhododendrons she has planted strong groups of Lilium auratum to “give a new picture of flower-beauty in the late summer and autumn.” She says that she has taken pains to make the garden melt imperceptibly into the wood. Once you have entered it, a series of paths diverging from the main grassy way call for different combinations of shade-loving trees, shrubs, and ground covers. As she invites us to accompany her on the fern walk, she wants us to understand that this is no wildwood but rather one that is simply a naturalistic part of the garden proper:
Just as wild gardening should never look like garden gardening, or, as it so sadly often does, like garden plants gone astray and quite out of place, so wood paths should never look like garden paths. There must be no hard edges, no conscious boundaries. The wood path is merely an easy way that the eye just perceives and the foot follows. It dies away imperceptibly on either side into the floor of the wood and is of exactly the same nature, only that it is smooth and easy and is not encumbered by projecting tree-roots, Bracken or Bramble, these being all removed when the path is made.
Penetrating deeper into the wood we find ourselves among oaks and birches.
Looking round, the view is here and there stopped by prosperous-looking Hollies, but for the most part one can see a fair way into the wood. In April the wood floor is plentifully furnished with Daffodils. Here, in the region farthest removed from the white Poet’s Daffodil of the upper ground, they are all of trumpet kinds, and the greater number of strong yellow colour. For the Daffodils range through the wood in a regular sequence of kinds that is not only the prettiest way to have them, but that I have often found, in the case of people who did not know their Daffodils well, served to make the whole story of their general kinds and relationships clear and plain; the hybrids of each group standing between the parent kinds; these again leading through other hybrids to further defined species, ending with the pure trumpets. As the sorts are intergrouped at their edges, so that
