Jekyll, Gertrude

born Nov. 29, 1843, London, Eng.

died Dec. 8, 1932, London

British landscape architect.

She pursued painting until 1891, when she turned to garden design. She helped the landscape designer William Robinson (1838–1935) in his writings about the natural garden and wrote several successful books on her own, including Wood and Garden (1899) and Home and Garden (1900). Her taste was for the simplicity and orderly disorder of cottage gardens. She later worked closely with Edwin L. Lutyens, developing a modern, informal style of garden marked by a rhythmic use of colour and form.

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▪ English landscape architect

born , Nov. 29, 1843, London

died Dec. 8, 1932

 English landscape architect who was the most successful advocate of the natural garden and who brought to the theories of her colleague William Robinson (Robinson, William) a cultivated sensibility he lacked.

      Born of a prosperous family, Jekyll was educated in music and painting and travelled in the Greek islands, where she studied architecture and history. Her chief interest was in painting until 1891, when her sight gave her trouble, and she applied herself wholeheartedly to gardening instead. Her taste was for the simplicity and orderly disorder of cottage gardens. She worked journalistically with Robinson and wrote a number of successful books, but her great contribution to the art was in the gardens she designed in association with the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Together they produced a new type of architectural garden in which the skeleton planned by Lutyens was given softness and an added rhythm by her handling of colour and local forms.

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