Product Description

Gertrude Jekyll is one of the most influential 20th-century garden designers. This book shows the best of her garden designs and a wonderful collection of her planting plans, made more accessible by extensive analysis and reinterpretation of the originals, accompanied by simple watercolours of the plans and illuminating photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #339744 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.57 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Library Journal
Bisgrove, director of the Landscape Management degree course at England's Reading University, has selected 47 plans of the British gardening doyenne Gertrude Jekyll, most of which have been unpublished until now. Introductory chapters provide historical data on Jekyll, who was an active garden maker from the late 19th century until her death in 1932. Her designs are divided and discussed by garden types (formal, rose, wild, or shrub gardens) or by a particular gardening challenge (steps and walls, sun and shade, or color combinations). A concluding chapter lists favorite "Jekyll plants" with descriptions and cultural information. The plans themselves have been enhanced with watercolor and clear plant labeling. Color photographs of Jekyll gardens, modern gardens in the Jekyll tradition, and individual plantings futher illustrate her skill at balancing discipline with generosity and harmony with contrast. Although much has been written about Jekyll, and happily many of her own writings have been reissued, actual plans of her garden designs are not as easily found. Recommended for most landscape design collections.
- Virginia A. Henrichs, Chicago Botanic Garden Lib., Glencoe, Ill.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover
"Should there be any doubt that Gertrude Jekyll was among the greatest practitioners of the art of gardening (there isn't, of course), a survey of this book will quickly confirm her almost totemic status in twentieth-century ornamental horticulture." (Wayne Winterrowd, Horticulture, The Magazine of American Gardening )

"[This book] is scholarly, well-written, and based on original research. The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll is the most innovative study of the patron saint of modern gardeners since Jane Brown's pioneering Gardens of a Golden Afternoon appeared ten years ago. . . . [Bisgrove's] is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever made of Gertrude Jekyll's gardening." (Charles Quest-Ritson, Gardens Illustrated )

"The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll serves as a living complement to her gardening ideas, indicating the scope and variety her gardening vision could assume. Richard Bisgrove has mined extensive archives for Jekyll's most effective planning schemes, and illustrates them with photographs of her existing gardens. He helpfully divides chapters by types of gardenincluding formal gardens, rose gardens, wild gardens, steps and walks, and sun and shade." (Ann Geneva, Literary Review )

"Gertrude Jekyll is famous the world over as the mother of the lush English garden. . . . The stage is set for an updated revival of the Jekyll cult. Her philosophical commitment to native plants and gardens that incorporate existing heathland and woods makes her environmentally up to date." (Diana Ketcham, New York Times)

"The most comprehensive study I have seen of the garde-making ideas of this astonishingly prolific lady . . . This is a book that can be read cover to cover -- but one to which people will refer time and again over the years." (Arthur Hellyer, Financial Times)

"Richard Bisgrove must now be firmly established as one of our most authoritative, painstaking yet easy-to-read garden historians . . . The writing is a happy combination of scholarship and art . . . readers must be equally delighted with Andrew Lawson's magnificent photographs." (Graham Stuart Thomas, The Garden)

About the Author
Richard Bisgrove is the director of the Landscape Management degree course at Reading University. He has designed gardens in Britain and the United States and lectures internationally on the history of garden design and on the work of Gertrude Jekyll.