18 Facts About Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist.

Gertrude Jekyll created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden.

Gertrude Jekyll's younger brother, Walter Jekyll, was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson who borrowed the family name for his 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Gertrude Jekyll 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 Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes and who designed her home Munstead Wood, near Godalming in Surrey.

Gertrude Jekyll is remembered for her outstanding designs and subtle, painterly approach to the arrangement of the gardens she created, particularly her "hardy flower borders".

Gertrude Jekyll's artistic ability had been evident when she was a child and she had trained as an artist.

Gertrude Jekyll was one of the first of her profession to take into account the colour, texture, and experience of gardens as aspects of her designs.

Gertrude Jekyll's focus on gardening began at South Kensington School of Art, where she became interested in the creative art of planting, and more specifically, gardening.

Gertrude Jekyll later returned to her childhood home in the village of Bramley to design a garden in Snowdenham Lane called Millmead.

Not wanting to limit her influence to teaching the practice of gardening, Gertrude Jekyll incorporated in her work the theory of gardening and an understanding of the plants themselves.

Gertrude Jekyll's writing was influenced by her friend Theresa Earle who had published her "Pot-pourri" books.

Later in life, Gertrude Jekyll collected and contributed a vast array of plants solely for the purpose of preservation to numerous institutions across Britain.

Gertrude Jekyll wrote over fifteen books, ranging from Wood and Garden and her most famous book, Colour in the Flower Garden, to memoirs of her youth.

Gertrude Jekyll was interested in traditional cottage furnishings and rural crafts, and concerned that they were disappearing.

From 1881, when she laid out the gardens for Munstead House, built for her mother by John James Stevenson, Gertrude Jekyll provided designs or planned planting for some four hundred gardens.

Gertrude Jekyll's restored long border at Upton Grey Manor House, Hampshire.

Gertrude Jekyll was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1897 and the Veitch Memorial Medal of the society in 1929.

In 1907, Gertrude Jekyll donated her collection of traditional household items and objects relating to "Old Surrey" to the Surrey Archaeological Society.