Home & Garden
The subtitle is Notes and Thoughts, Practical and Critical, of a Worker in Both. Gertrude Jekyll introduces the book, which has more than fifty of her own illustrations, by reference to the favourable reception of Wood and Garden, published a year earlier, which ‘proved that there are many who are willing to receive such suggestions as my many years of work as a practical amateur have enabled me to make.’ A nineteenth century blogger!
The book covers gardening, craftsmanship and the construction of her own house, Munstead Wood, with the collaboration of the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, reminding us that she was very much influenced by the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement. One chapter is devoted to a garden of wall flowers.
The first chapter is entitled ‘How the house was built\, while the rest is mostly about garden matters, though ‘grouped with allied home subjects.’ In describimg the construction of Munstead Wood, she pays tribute to the architect Lutyens and the craftsman responsible for the wood carving: ‘… my good architect, who conceived the place in exactly such a form as I had desired, but could not have decribed, and the fine old carpenter who worked to his drawings…a good example of how English oak should be used in an honest building…’