The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll

ISBN: 0316096571

Author: Bisgrove, Richard

Condition: New

Gertrude Jekyll holds a unique place in the making of English gardens and has exerted immense influence on good garden planting throughout the world. Her genius was to endow gardens with an atmosphere of timeless serenity, valued in her own day but all the more precious in the tumult of the modern world.Over the years, many of her gardens and original plantings have disappeared, and only a handful of her plans are well known, although thousands survive in archives.For The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll Richard Bisgrove has selected the best of Miss Jekyll's planting plans, most until now unpublished. With painstaking original research he has analyzed and reinterpreted them, making them accessible to today's gardeners. He demonstrates that Miss Jekyll's ideas on planting remain fresh and relevant. Though many of the gardens she worked on were large, she usually preferred to divide them into smaller components. Her skill in using plants to soften the hard lines of new gardens and formal architecture, her ability to compose plantings to sustain interest throughout the seasons, her solutions to the problems of shady spots and awkward corners - all these make her designs directly applicable to today's limited plots.The plans are brought alive by an accomplished watercolorist and are enhanced by full-color photographs of Jekyll gardens and of modern plantings in the Jekyll tradition.