Jekyll’s account of her own garden at Munstead Wood in Surrey, month by month and part by part, and above all of the long hardy flower border planted in a sequence of colours from cool at the ends to hot at the centre.
Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) trained as a painter and embroiderer and turned to gardens when her eyesight failed. She made her garden at Munstead Wood from the 1880s; the house there was built for her in 1896–97 by Edwin Lutyens, who was twenty-six years younger and whom she had met in 1889. Together they made the Arts and Crafts garden: his plans of terraces, walls, steps, rills and pergolas in local stone, her planting. She designed some four hundred gardens, many by correspondence from planting plans, and wrote over a dozen books and more than a thousand articles, many for Country Life.
Colour in the Flower Garden (later editions are called Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden) describes the main border at Munstead Wood, two hundred feet long and fourteen deep, against a stone wall, and the smaller gardens of a single colour: the grey garden, the gold garden, the blue garden and the green garden. Her method is the painter’s: plants are placed for their colour, in long drifts that overlap, and colours are arranged so that the eye is prepared for each by the one before.
The book, part by part
I The main flower border
The border at Munstead Wood and its sequence of colours; drifts; plants for each part; how gaps are filled as plants go over.
Rules: The border planted by colour
II The seasonal gardens and the gardens of special colouring
The spring garden, the June garden, the September borders; the grey, gold, blue and green gardens; woodland and the wild garden.