Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden
A reminder of the skills of Gertrude Jekyll as a painter. At the age of 18, she enrolled in the South Kensington School of Art; she was much influenced by Turner, Ruskin and, later, the pre-Raphaelites and French impressionist painters. When her eyesight began to fail, she turned more and more to garden design.
This book combines practical and aesthetic advice with a view to creating what she called ‘garden pictures’. She complained, in the book, that gardeners were not helped by seedsmen in their forward planning of their colour harmonies, taking Messrs Sutton to task for listing a seed as ‘azure-blue’, when the flower was, in fact, tender pale lavender-lilac.
The modern edition is prefaced by Richard Bisgrove. The orginal turned out to be one of her most successful books. Gertrude Jekyll closes the introduction with these words:
‘I must ask my readers not to take it amiss if I mention here that I cannot undertake to show it [ie colour-combination in the garden] them on the spot. I am a solitary worker; I am growing old and tired, and suffer from very bad and painful sight. My garden is my workshop, my private study and place of rest’.
Although 65 years of age, she continued working at garden design, gardening and writing well into her eighties.