Wood & Garden
This is the first of Gertrude Jekyll’s books, published in 1899 by Longmans, Green & Co, having first appeard in part as articles in The Guardian Newspaper, when she was 55 years of age. A gardening calendar takes the reader through each month of the year and covers every size of garden.
The focus of the book is the creation of her own house and garden at Munstead Wood in Surrey; this was the beginning of her important collaboration with the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Additional chapters deal with: beginning & learning, borders, colours, scents, weeds & pests, variety & novelty, bedding and primroses; the chapter “The worship of false gods” deals with prizes and shows and “Masters and men” with the relationship between gardeners and the owners of gardens.
The book’s subtitle is Notes and Thoughts, Practical and Critical, of a Working Amateur. By ‘amateur’, Gertrude Jekyll means that she did gardening for the love of it, although we would regard her as a thorough professional. Here are her words of encouragement from the Introduction:
‘Let no-one be discouraged by the thought of how much there is to learn…..For the first steps are steps into a delightful Unkown, the first successes are victories all the happier for being scarcely expected……Every new step becomes a little surer, and each new grasp a little firmer, till, little by little, comes the power of intelligent combination, the nearest thing we can know to the mighty force of creation’.
Her definition of the attributes of a gardener:
‘…..a combinationn of comnon sense and sincerity of purpose, allied to a sense of beauty and artisitc knowledge’.