Colour photographs of Gertrude Jekyll’s garden, rediscovered in the Country Life Archive, offer a rare glimpse of what it looked like at the peak of her fame
In 1997, Country Life published a set of chromatic photographs of Gertrude Jekyll’s Munstead Wood garden that had lain undisturbed in our archive for nearly a century. We have reproduced the pictures, corresponding feature and captions here.
It has long been fascinating to imagine what Gertrude Jekyll’s own garden looked like in colour. Her engaging descriptions of Munstead Wood, in books and articles, often illustrated with her own black-and-white photographs, spoke volumes, but unless one’s knowledge of colour was as precise as hers, it was difficult to picture the scene in colour. But now autochrome photographs rediscovered in the Country Life archives, spell out what many have speculated about.
The autochromes add a new dimension to Jekyll’s Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, published by Country Life in 1908, and are still the best guide to her gardens at Munstead Wood.
The most memorable part of the garden for visitors: Jekyll's hardy flower border, designed for bloom from July to early September. When she planted this in the early 1890s, she drew on years of practical gardening experience. As Graham Stuart Thomas recently commented: 'The graduation of tints in the whole 200ft long by 14ft wide border testified to the skill of her garden staff and her ideas.' The autochrome depicts a details on the brilliant sunset colouring in the middle section, with geraniums, annual salvias, cannas and scarlet dahlia Fire King. Deep-toned hollyhocks at the back, echoed in the red-toned foliage against the wall are cooled by frothy mounds of Gypsophila paniculata. Jekyll's comment — that 'all flowers are welcome that are right in colour' — is amply illustrated in this border.
Fortunately, they were taken at different times of the year, so that the various seasonal gardens can each be appreciated in their prime.
When these autochrome plates were rediscovered in the Country Life archives, it was assumed that they were Jekyll’s own — she was an accomplished photographer. But it is more likely that they were the work of Country Life’s then gardening editor Herbert Cowley, a frequent visitor to Munstead Wood.
What visitors rarely saw were the working gardens, an area of less than two acres that included a kitchen garden, a large orchard and a nursery. The grey garden in front of the loft is a subtle tapestry of soft blues and pinks to complement the building's grey-tinged weather-boarding. In one of the grey garden's four small beds, all edged with grey artemisia, drifts of white Achillea ptarmica The Pearl and Lilium longiflorum contrast with cascades of purple clematis, trained along bluish grey globe thistles and pink hollyhock.
By the summer of 1907, when the Lumière brothers were marketing this single-plate colour process, Jekyll was already winding down her photographic career. She would have been intrigued by autochrome photography, which produced flat, dense, and grainy pictures, unlike the rich texture and tonality of black-and-white.
This technique involved green, violet and orange-coloured starch grains being spread over a plate covered with a panchromatic emulsion. Exposure times were long, processing complex, plates costly and good eyesight essential.
The brilliant display in the September borders is not to be confused with the October michaelmas daisy border near the house. The September borders flanked a pathway through the centre of the working gardens, and had touches of many colours. The autochrome shows drifts of pale yellows (marigolds and snapdragons), white (moon daisy), dark blue (helitropes), deep rose (Sedum spectabile), and silver (Artemisia stelleriana), used by Jekyll to complement the misty blues and rich purples of the asters.
Before the rediscovery, garden historians had relied on the recollections of some of the Munstead Wood’s many visitors to help paint a picture of the garden. One such as the eminent plantsman Graham Stuart Thomas, who paid a call in 1931 and was spellbound. He has read Jekyll’s books, but nothing has prepared him for the experience of seeing the actual garden, especially the colour borders.
Surprisingly full illustrations depicted the famous garden in colour: fewer than a dozen paintings, mostly by Helen Allingham. The 10 Country Life photographs, taken in about 1912, now bridge this gap.
It would, however, be misleading to suggest that Munstead Wood looks like these vignettes in any one year. Like most ephemeral works of art, Jekyll’s garden is best remembered by her own words and illustrations, now augmented by the Country Life autochromes.
This feature originally appeared inside the May 15, 1997, issue of Country Life.
The life and times of Gertrude Jekyll
1840s
Gertrude Jekyll was a difficult child. Her father called her a ‘queer fish’; she infuriated her mother by clumping through the best rooms of their Surrey country house in her gardening boot.
1860s
As a young woman, she attended the South Kensington School of Art, where, as a disciple of John Ruskin and William Morris, she imagined herself embarking on a career as a painter and artist-craftswoman.
As a painter, she was unsuccessful, but enjoyed a certain Society fame for her decorative work in inlay, silverwork and interior fabrics. And thus she might have remained, a talented but obscure figure on the fringes of the rising Arts-and-Crafts movement from the mid 19th century.
1880s
Of all those who have attempted to design gardens according to artistic principles, Jekyll was perhaps the most conscientious. She observed the way Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s mid-19th-century theories of colour combination had been applied to annual bedding schemes and applied them to the use of hardy plants, establishing an approach to garden design that remains the basis of much modern work.
1890-1914
Jekyll formed alliances with the garden writer William Robinson and the architect Edwin Lutyens, which resolved ideological struggles and set new standards for garden-making by thoughtful experiment and reasoned moderation.
Her clients were typically drawn from her own background of prosperous gentlefolk. Her design ideas, divided between the neat geometry of her terraced parterres (reinforced with strong evergreens such as yuccas, right, and bergenias) and the sinuous lines of her woodland-edge shrubberies, were spelt out in informative but ponderous books in the years between 1899 and 1914.
Through her association with Lutyens, Jekyll became closely associated with Country Life in the magazine’s formative years. Contributor George Plumptre once said that her partnership with the famed architect ‘provided the alchemy of the modern garden, a magical blend of attitude and action whose legacy became embedded in gardens of the 20th century and beyond.’
Country Life covered Lutyens and Jekyll's first joint commission at Orchards, the home of Jekyll’s friends, William and Julia Chance.
1919-1932
After her pre-war success, the changed nature of society after the horrors of the First World War and her own advancing years meant a quiet final chapter.
Many of her gardens declined in the mid 20th century, but several modern restorations have ensured a renewed and lasting interest in her work, which has influenced successive designers from Karl Foerster (1874-1970) to Piet Oudolf in the present day. Jekyll died in 1932 and was buried in Busbridge churchyard, Surrey.
Her monument, by Lutyens, records her as ‘Artist, Gardener, Craftswoman’. Her obituary in The Times recorded that she did not cease ‘to share widely the fruits of her long and loving apprenticeship to Nature’.
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