The border planted by colour

Jekyll trained as a painter and read the colour theory of her day, and her border is composed like a painting seen as one walks. The main border at Munstead Wood, two hundred feet long and fourteen deep, backed by a stone wall, begins and ends in grey-leaved plants with blue, white and pale yellow flowers, passes through stronger yellow and orange, and reaches a centre of red. The eye, prepared by each colour for the next, sees each more vividly; and coming back from the red it finds the blues and greys intensified by contrast.

The drift, a long narrow planting of one kind laid lengthways along the border, overlaps its neighbours, so that when one plant finishes flowering the gap is small and is hidden by the plants on either side. Gaps were also filled with plants in pots or with later-flowering plants trained over the dying ones. She applied the same thinking to gardens of a single colour, grey, gold, blue and green, each with flowers of other colours used sparingly to make it tell.