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Edward Joseph Hill Jekyll Fc Married Married Married Married Married Married Married Married Married: 1836 Julia Hammersley F/Mc | |||||
| Gertrude Jekyll [CFT #4566] Born: 1843 Died: 1932 |
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| b London A major figure in the development of garden design, Gertrude Jekyll did not set out to make gardening her career. In her late teens she had enrolled as a student at the Kensington School of Art, a bold step for a young lady in mid Victorian times. She had friends who were influential in artistic circles - she knew Ruskin, G.F.Watts and William Morris - and she travelled widely in Europe. Her success as an artist led to a commission to do the interior design for the Duke of Westminster's mansion in Cheshire, but this was not the course her life was to take, for the deterioration of her eyesight compelled her to abandon almost entirely her favourite occupations of painting and embroidery. She had always loved flowers, and friendship with gardening neighbours had encouraged her interest. She contributed articles to the gardening press and these were later published in book form. A meeting with the young architect Edwin Lutyens led to his designing a house for her at Munstead Wood near Godalming in Surrey, and to a fruitful partnership in which Miss Jekyll planned the gardens of houses built by Lutyens. Her great contribution to horticulture was that she translated gardening into terms of painting in her use of colour and light and shade. She brought to Garden design an Artist's good taste, a knowledge of rural tradition, and a respect for craftsmanship, and especially of the architect's craft, which so marks her work with Lutyens. Moreover, her love of flowers, particularly of scented ones and of the traditional plants of cottage gardens, made fashionable many soecies long disdained in sophisticated gardens. Betty Massingham 1975 |
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