Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll portrait (1920)

The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives.

Gertrude Jekyll Garden, Hatchlands

Gertrude Jekyll (29 November 1843 – 8 December 1932) was a 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.

Quotes

• The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives.
  • As quoted in Dig, Plant, and Grow! (2009) by Louise Spilsbury, p. 13

Colour in the Garden (1908)

Colour in the Garden Country Life Library, George Newnes Ltd, London, 1908

• I am strongly of the opinion that possession of plants, however good, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection.

• The duty we owe to our gardens is to so use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes.

• Paint upon a palette, delighting our eyes with soul-satisfying pictures, a treasure of well set jewels a sympathy with growing things, fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body. This sense of beauty is a gift of God.

• To devise these living pictures with simple well-known flowers seems to me to be the best thing to do in gardening.

External links

• The Gertrude Jekyll Estate
• Restored Jekyll garden at Upton Grey
• Short biography of Jekyll from Emily Compost
• Online text of Gertrude Jekyll's Colour schemes for the flower garden (1921)
• Restored Jekyll garden at Durmast House, Burley, Hampshire, UK
• Jekyll garden in Woodbury CT, USA
• Gertrude Jekyll's garden designs @ Ward's Book of Days
• Times Obituary