Born in 1843, Gertrude Jekyll designed at least 400 gardens in the UK, America, and Europe in her lifetime, and was a top figure of the UK’s arts & crafts movement. She’d trained in art, but turned her life’s focus to gardening and made use of her painting background using the color wheel, etc.
Though she wrote 15 books and around 2,000 articles herself, and there are numerous books and articles about her, it’s hard to get a grasp on her personality. While it’s presumptuous to say, it’s probably due to how boring she was. Aside from gardening, she appears to only have two other things noteworthy about her. One would be her snobbery. She was born in the upper crust and oozed Victorian haughtiness. She may have championed the informal cottagey simple life in art and garden design within the Arts & Crafts movement, but her attitude toward actual cottagey common folk was pretty condescending, believing they were only good for manual labor because they lacked creativity due to their lack of education.
The second interesting thing about her was her younger brother, Walter. Nearly every online description of Gertrude Jekyll mentions her brother Walter because he was friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, who used the Jekyll surname for his book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. What’s more interesting is Walter started as an Anglican priest who served as a bishop. It was evident that Walter was comfortable with his sexuality and did not try to conceal it. He was a deep thinker and had realized that there were inconsistencies in the Bible and that many Christian leaders had misused the teachings of the holy book. As a result, he renounced his religion, relocated to Jamaica, and wrote a book on Jamaican folk songs. Walter was a mentor and close confidant to Claude McKaye, who went on to become a prominent writer and activist during the Harlem Renaissance. Some even speculate that Walter and Claude were in a romantic relationship.
Other Interesting Things About Walter Jekyll:
He became a priest in the Church of England in 1875.
Immediately after denouncing his religion, he moved to Milan to study singing for a short time under Francesco Lamperti.
He moved to Jamaica in 1894.
He wrote the book The Bible Untrustworthy in 1904.
He died in Jamaica in 1929.
Don’t get me wrong–Gertrude Jekyll made a big dent in the garden world. She began writing prolifically in her 50s and ran a successful plant nursery. Miss Jekyll worked up until her death at 89 while blind and wheelchair bound. Still, her brother Walter was just a lot less boring.
Gertrude Jekyll: The Queen of Gardens. aljazerra.com. Nov. 2017.
Bisgrove, Richard (15 October 1992). The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll.
Frances Lincoln Jekyll, G. Wood and Garden (Longmans, Green and Co., 1899).
Tankard, Judith B. (2018). Gardens of the Arts & Craft Movement (Hardback). Portland, Oregon: Timber Press.
Wood, Martin. The Unknown Gertrude Jekyll. London: Frances Lincoln, 2006.
Tillery, Tyrone (1992). Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. University of Massachusetts Press.
Festing, Sally. Gertrude Jekyll. London: Viking, 1991.
Schwartz, A.B. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana University Press, 2003