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Gertrude Jekyll

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gertrude Jekyll
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(born Nov. 29, 1843, London, Eng. — died Dec. 8, 1932, London) British landscape architect. She pursued painting until 1891, when she turned to garden design. She helped the landscape designer William Robinson (1838 – 1935) in his writings about the natural garden and wrote several successful books on her own, including Wood and Garden (1899) and Home and Garden (1900). Her taste was for the simplicity and orderly disorder of cottage gardens. She later worked closely with Edwin L. Lutyens, developing a modern, informal style of garden marked by a rhythmic use of colour and form.

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Art Encyclopedia: Gertrude Jekyll
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(b London, 29 Nov 1843; d Godalming, Surrey, 8 Dec 1932). English garden designer and writer. Best remembered for her books on horticulture and the gardens she made with the architect EDWIN LUTYENS, she first trained (1861-3) as a painter at the Kensington School of Art, London, and (c. 1870) under Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. Private means allowed her to concentrate on learning one art or craft after another, from embroidery to stone-carving. In 1882 she began contributing horticultural articles to magazines and advising acquaintances on planting schemes. She met the young Lutyens in 1889 and introduced him to some of his first important clients. He designed Munstead Wood, Godalming, for her in 1896. True to her Arts and Crafts background, Jekyll promoted the cottage-garden style of old-fashioned flowers, informally planted; her opinions and expertise made her a household name. Her first book, Wood and Garden, illustrated with her own photographs, appeared in 1899. Her schemes for about 300 gardens are known (numerous plans, Berkeley, U. CA, Coll. Envmt. Des., Doc. Col.), of which about 100 involved Lutyens, with whom she was most active between c. 1890 and c. 1910. Good (restored) examples of their joint undertakings are Deanery Garden (1899-1901; see LUTYENS, EDWIN, fig. 1), Sonning, Berks, and Hestercombe (1904), Somerset (see GARDEN,

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Architecture and Landscaping: Gertrude Jekyll
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(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)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Gertrude Jekyll
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Jekyll, Gertrude, 1843-1932, British artist, landscape gardener, and crafts artist. She was associated with William Robinson and Edwin Lutyens in developing an informal and natural style of garden. Her works include Wood and Garden (1899) and Garden Ornament (1918).
Wikipedia: Gertrude Jekyll
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Restored Gertrude Jekyll border at Manor House, Upton Grey, Hampshire.[1]

Gertrude Jekyll (29 November 1843 – 8 December 1932; surname pronounced /ˈdʒiːkəl/ JEE-kəl) was an influential British garden designer, writer, and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and the USA and contributed over 1,000 articles to Country Life, The Garden and other magazines.[2]

Gertrude Jekyll was born at 2 Grafton Street, Mayfair, London, the fifth of the seven children of Captain Edward JH Jekyll, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and his wife Julia Hammersley. Her younger brother, the Reverend Walter Jekyll, was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed the family name for his famous novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In 1848 her family left London and moved to Bramley House, Surrey, where she spent her formative years.

Contents

Themes

Jekyll should be more correctly categorized as a planter than as a "designer". She did indeed design, but did it through her plantings rather than traditional design aspects. She was one half of one of the most influential and historical partnerships of the Arts and Crafts movement, thanks to her association with the English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes, and by whom her home Munstead Wood was designed. [3] (In 1900, Lutyens and Jekyll's brother Herbert designed the British Pavilion for the Paris Exposition.)

Jekyll is remembered less for her outstanding designs but instead for her subtle, painterly approach to the arrangement of the gardens she created, particularly her "hardy flower borders" (not herbaceous borders). Her work is known for its radiant colour and the brush-like strokes of her plantings; it is suggested by some that the Impressionistic-style schemes may have been due to Jekyll's deteriorating eyesight, which largely put an end to her career as a painter and watercolourist.

Jekyll was one of the first of her profession to take into account the colour, texture, and experience of gardens as the prominent authorities in her designs, and she was a life-long fan of plants of all genres. Her theory of how to design with colour was influenced by painter JMW Turner and by Impressionism. Later in life, Jekyll collected and contributed a vast array of plants solely for the purpose of preservation to numerous institutions across Britain. This pure passion for gardening was started at South Kensington School of Art,[4] where she fell in love with the creative art of planting, and even more specifically, gardening. At the time of her death, she had designed over 400 gardens in Britain, Europe and even a few in North America. Jekyll was also known for her prolific writing. She penned over fifteen books, ranging from Wood and Garden and her most famous book Colour in the Flower Garden, to memoirs of her youth. Jekyll did not want to limit her influence to teaching the practice of gardening, but to take it a step further to the quiet study of gardening and the plants themselves.[5]

Jekyll later returned to her childhood home in the village of Bramley, Surrey to design a garden in Snowdenham Lane called Millmead. She was also interested in traditional cottage furnishings and rural crafts, and concerned that they were disappearing. Her book Old West Surrey (1904) records many aspects of 19th century country life, with over 300 photographs taken by Jekyll.

She is buried in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist, Busbridge, Godalming, next to her brother and sister-in-law, Sir Herbert Jekyll, KCMG and Lady Agnes Jekyll, DBE. The monument was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

See also

References

  1. ^ [1] Border 5
  2. ^ Bisgrove, Richard. The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll.London: Frances Lincoln, 2006.
  3. ^ Tankard, Judith B. and Martin A. Wood. Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood. Bramley Books, 1998.
  4. ^ "About Gertrude Jekyll". http://www.gertrudejekyllgarden.co.uk/jekylldesign.htm. Retrieved 2007-12-19. 
  5. ^ Wood, Martin. The Unknown Gertrude Jekyll.London: Frances Lincoln, 2006.

External links


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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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