the general relationship of kins is easily learnt.
They are planted, not in patches but in long drifts, a way that not only shows the plant in good number to better advantage, but that is singularly happy in its effect in the woodland landscape. This is specially noticeable towards the close of day, when the sunlight, yellowing as it nears the horizon, lights up the long stretches of yellow bloom with an increase of colour strength, while the wide-stretching shadow lengths throw the woodland shades into large phrases of broadened mass, all subdued and harmonized by the same yellow light that illuminates the long level rank of golden bloom.
This attention to the effects of light should alert us to the fact that Jekyll was an excellent photographer, and she can be credited with almost all of the illustrations in her books. Through the camera’s lens as well as verbally, she captures her garden pictures in every season. Were we to take a tour of her woodland garden again in June after the spring bulbs have bloomed, we would see how the same yellowing light of late afternoon makes her careful color scheme of the rhododendrons still more successful “by throwing its warm tone over the whole.” But we should not forget to look down, for “nearer at hand the Fern walk has its own little pictures”:
In early summer there are patches of Trillium, the White Wood Lily, in cool hollows among the ferns, and, some twenty paces further up, another wider group of the same. Between the two, spreading through a mossy bank, in and out among the ferns and right down to the path, next to a patch of Oak Fern, is a charming little white flower. Its rambling roots thread their way under the mossy carpet, and every few inches throw up a neat little stem and leaves crowned with a starry flower of tenderest white. It is Trientalis, a native of our most northern hill-woods, the daintiest of all woodland flowers.
Carrying our eyes up from the ground are “the stately Foxgloves.” Jekyll remarks, “It is good to see their strong spikes of solid bloom standing six to seven feet high, and then to look down again at the lowly Trientalis and to note how the tender little blossom, poised on its thread-like stem, holds its own in interest and importance.” A bit farther along the fern walk near another group of Trillium is a patch of Asarum virginicum, a low-growing North American plant with shiny, roundish leaves and a wax-like brown and greenish flower, near which a little terrestrial orchid, Goodyera repens, is nestling in a tuft of moss. The fern walk ends where several other woodland paths intersect.
If we so wished, we could continue our delightful and instructive garden journey with Jekyll, but by now the reader will have perceived why her representation of the gardener as artist set so many subsequent English and American gardeners on the path toward making their own garden pictures. It is hard to think of the woman whom Edwin Lutyens called “Aunt Bumps” as being a revolutionary figure in landscape history. When, however, we meet other garden writers in this essay, we will see how many times she is referred to by them and the degree to which they are indebted to her for “a good flower-eye.”
Sketch of Gertrude Jekyll digging a sunflower
by Edwin Lutyens, 6 August, 1897.
Warriors in the Garden
GARDENING is nothing less than warfare with nature. With no respect for the cabbage or the rose, nature sends in her legions of hungry insects and foraging animals to wreak havoc. But there is another kind of warfare in the garden, one that is waged against fellow gardeners rather than garden pests. In this kind of warfare garden theory is often presented as a polemical diatribe against previous practices or contrary philosophies. For the reader, it is both instructive and amusing to argue or agree with certain opinionated writers and to refight the horticultural battles of yesteryear as they promulgate their passionate beliefs and ideas.
William Robinson
If Jekyll was the authoritative mother of a more naturalistic English garden style, her friend William Robinson (1838–1935) was its highly influential father. He also serves as the prime exemplar of a didactic and sometimes colorfully caustic genre of garden writing. In Robinson’s view, the architect was the enemy of good landscape design, which he held to be the exclusive province of the gardener—that is, the enlightened gardener who agreed with him that mowing be forsaken in some parts of the garden so that cut lawns would transform themselves into wildflower meadows. His further ideal was to allow climbing plants to entwine themselves on trunks and branches, and he dogmatically declared that fallen leaves should be left on the ground as natural mulch in woodlands.
A trained professional gardener, Robinson had a botanist’s as well as a horticulturist’s thorough knowledge of plant species and their growth habits. He was adamantly opposed to greenhouse-grown annuals planted in regimental rows or showy ornamental beds. He also detested the display of trees and shrubs in Loudon’s Gardenesque style as individual specimens, and he vigorously proselytized the overthrow of late Victorian gardening in favor of one in which bulbs were planted in drifts, herbaceous beds were composed of mixed perennials, and horticultural species appeared to merge at the garden’s perimeter with the native vegetation of meadows and woodlands. Together he and Jekyll redirected garden design in a way that gave the world what is now thought of as the prototypical English garden—a blending of wild and artificial nature; the grouping of trees and shrubs to form pleasing landscape vistas; the use of hedges to create more intimately scaled garden “rooms”; and the laying out of beds in which casually composed yet sophisticated plant combinations—based on a thorough knowledge of floral and leaf colors, blooming times, and growth characteristics—made gardens interesting throughout the entire year.
Two years after the publication of The English Flower Garden (1883)—a volume that eventually ran to fifteen editions and remained in print for fifty years—Robinson purchased the Elizabethan manor of Gravetye in Sussex along with its adjoining two hundred acres. He subsequently acquired additional land so that his property totaled a thousand acres, more than sufficient in size for rural nature and naturalistic garden to be melded into a unified landscape with unobstructed views of the horizon. Here, with occasional advice from his friend Jekyll, he created broad scenic effects as well as herbaceous gardens closer to the manor. The landscape theories he put into practice at Gravetye, however, had been articulated long before in The Wild Garden (1870).
“Siberian columbine in a rocky place,” engraving by Alfred Parsons from The Wild Garden, William Robinson, 1895 edition.
It would be a mistake, as Robinson is at pains to point out, to assume that the wild garden is the same thing as the native-plant garden. It should, to the contrary, be considered an opportunity to naturalize the flora of other countries, for as he tells us:
Naturally our woods and wilds have no little loveliness in spring; we have here and there the Lily of the Valley and the Snowdrop, and everywhere the Primrose and Cowslip; the Bluebell and the Foxglove take possession of whole woods; but, with all our treasures in this way, we have no attractions in or near our gardens compared with what it is within our power to create. There are many countries, with winters colder than our own, that have a rich flora; and by choosing the hardiest exotics and planting them without the garden, we may form garden pictures.
Here it is important to pause a moment and consider again the term “garden pictures,” since it is so frequently found in the writing of both Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll. For these writers, garden pictures did not imply the same thing as the Picturesque, the term commonly used to describe the earlier garden style in which designed landscapes were created in accordance with
