Writing the Garden. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
importance of training oneself to have “a good flower-eye.” Light plays an important role, as does seasonality, in the making of Jekyll’s garden pictures. And color and growing habit are all-important considerations. Here, for instance, is how she describes her half-acre plantation of azaleas: “The whites are planted at the lower and more shady end of the group; next come the yellows and pale pinks, and these are followed at a little distance by kinds whose flowers are of orange, copper, flame, and scarlet-crimson colourings; this strong-coloured group again softening off into the woodland by bushes of the common yellow Azalea pontica, and its variety with flowers of larger size and deeper colour.”
Dorothea and Dinah at Orchards. Children and Gardens by Gertrude Jekyll, 1908. Courtesy of Judith B. Tankard.
It is thus not surprising to learn that Jekyll was a painter before poor eyesight caused her to exchange her palette of pigments for one of plants. In Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) she continues to paint garden pictures with the same kind of compositional forethought as an artist who first sketches the outlines of a new work on canvas. To explain her design method, Jekyll illustrates the book with diagrams for various beds and borders. The originator of color themes, she depicts plans for a gold garden, an orange garden, a gray garden, a blue garden, and a green garden. In addition, she inserts between some of the pages foldout plans for other gardens at Munstead Wood, including her long main border, the September border of early Michaelmas daisies, the June iris border, and her hidden garden. Studying these we perceive how, in order to achieve a tapestrylike weave of tone and texture, her flower schemes appear as loosely sketched, overlapping dia gonal drifts. This approach to gardening is, of course, the antithesis of that of the Victorian gardeners who created precisely edged beds displaying showy annuals in patterned arrangements.
“Plan for the Hidden Garden” by Gertrude Jekyll. Colour in the Flower Garden, 1908.
Above all, it is movement through the garden, the alternation of scenes from sunny lawn to shady woodland, that makes Munstead Wood such a delightful sensory experience. Here is how we begin our walk in her woodland garden:
My house, a big cottage, stands facing a little to the east of south, just below the wood. The windows of the sitting-room and its outer door, which stands open in all fine summer weather, look up a straight wide grassy way, the vista being ended by a fine old Scotch Fir with a background of dark wood. This old Fir and one other, and a number in and near the southern hedge, are all that remain of the older wood which was Scotch Fir.
This green wood walk, being the widest and most important, is treated more boldly than the others—with groups of Rhododendrons in the region rather near the house, and for the rest only a biggish patch of the two North American Brambles, the white-flowered Rubus nutkanus, and the rosy R. odoratus. In spring the western region of tall Spanish Chestnuts, which begins just beyond the Rhododendrons, is carpeted with Poets’ Narcissus; the note of tender white blossom being taken up and repeated by the bloom-clouds of Amelanchier, that charming little woodland flowering tree whose use in such ways is so much neglected. Close to the ground in the distance the light comes with brilliant effect through the young leaves of a wide-spread carpet of Lily of the Valley, whose clusters of sweet little white bells will be a delight a month hence.
The Rhododendrons are carefully grouped for colour—pink, white, rose and red of the best qualities are in the sunniest part, while, kept well apart from them, near the tall chestnuts and rejoicing in their partial shade, are the purple colourings, of as pure and cool a purple as may be found among carefully selected ponticum seedlings and the few named kinds that associate well with them. . . .
Jekyll goes on to tell us how among the rhododendrons she has planted strong groups of Lilium auratum to “give a new picture of flower-beauty in the late summer and autumn.” She says that she has taken pains to make the garden melt imperceptibly into the wood. Once you have entered it, a series of paths diverging from the main grassy way call for different combinations of shade-loving trees, shrubs, and ground covers. As she invites us to accompany her on the fern walk, she wants us to understand that this is no wildwood but rather one that is simply a naturalistic part of the garden proper:
Just as wild gardening should never look like garden gardening, or, as it so sadly often does, like garden plants gone astray and quite out of place, so wood paths should never look like garden paths. There must be no hard edges, no conscious boundaries. The wood path is merely an easy way that the eye just perceives and the foot follows. It dies away imperceptibly on either side into the floor of the wood and is of exactly the same nature, only that it is smooth and easy and is not encumbered by projecting tree-roots, Bracken or Bramble, these being all removed when the path is made.
Penetrating deeper into the wood we find ourselves among oaks and birches.
Looking round, the view is here and there stopped by prosperous-looking Hollies, but for the most part one can see a fair way into the wood. In April the wood floor is plentifully furnished with Daffodils. Here, in the region farthest removed from the white Poet’s Daffodil of the upper ground, they are all of trumpet kinds, and the greater number of strong yellow colour. For the Daffodils range through the wood in a regular sequence of kinds that is not only the prettiest way to have them, but that I have often found, in the case of people who did not know their Daffodils well, served to make the whole story of their general kinds and relationships clear and plain; the hybrids of each group standing between the parent kinds; these again leading through other hybrids to further defined species, ending with the pure trumpets. As the sorts are intergrouped at their edges, so that at least two removes are in view at one time, the lesson in the general relationship of kins is easily learnt.
They are planted, not in patches but in long drifts, a way that not only shows the plant in good number to better advantage, but that is singularly happy in its effect in the woodland landscape. This is specially noticeable towards the close of day, when the sunlight, yellowing as it nears the horizon, lights up the long stretches of yellow bloom with an increase of colour strength, while the wide-stretching shadow lengths throw the woodland shades into large phrases of broadened mass, all subdued and harmonized by the same yellow light that illuminates the long level rank of golden bloom.
This attention to the effects of light should alert us to the fact that Jekyll was an excellent photographer, and she can be credited with almost all of the illustrations in her books. Through the camera’s lens as well as verbally, she captures her garden pictures in every season. Were we to take a tour of her woodland garden again in June after the spring bulbs have bloomed, we would see how the same yellowing light of late afternoon makes her careful color scheme of the rhododendrons still more successful “by throwing its warm tone over the whole.” But we should not forget to look down, for “nearer at hand the Fern walk has its own little pictures”:
In early summer there are patches of Trillium, the White Wood Lily, in cool hollows among the ferns, and, some twenty paces further up, another wider group of the same. Between the two, spreading through a mossy bank, in and out among the ferns and right down to the path, next to a patch of Oak Fern, is a charming little white flower. Its rambling roots thread their way under the mossy carpet, and every few inches throw up a neat little stem and leaves crowned with a starry flower of tenderest white. It is Trientalis, a native of our most northern hill-woods, the daintiest of all woodland flowers.
Carrying our eyes up from the ground are “the stately Foxgloves.” Jekyll remarks, “It is good to see their strong spikes of solid bloom standing six to seven feet high, and then to look down again at the lowly Trientalis and to note how the tender little blossom, poised on its thread-like stem, holds its own in interest and importance.” A bit farther along the fern walk near another group of Trillium is a patch of Asarum virginicum, a low-growing North American plant with shiny, roundish leaves and a wax-like brown and greenish flower, near which a little terrestrial orchid, Goodyera repens, is nestling in a tuft of moss. The fern walk ends where several other woodland paths intersect.
If we so wished,