When Ned met Auntie Bumps

A chance meeting at a tea party in Surrey led one of the greatest partnerships (and friendships) in English garden history, as Mark Griffiths explains…

- Mark Griffiths

BY the time of her death, aged 89, in December 1932, Gertrude Jekyll had designed at least 400 gardens. Her publications included 12 best-selling books on gardening and over 1,138 articles. Every year for the past three decades, she had sold thousands of plants raised in the nursery that she established at Munstead Wood, her home and garden near Godalming in Surrey. Many were specialties that she had collected, bred or selected, among them such future classics as Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’ and Vinca minor ‘Gertrude Jekyll’.

In addition to these achievements, there were the arts and crafts that had chiefly occupied her up until her forties — painting, embroidery, interior design, metalworking, and carving. The painter George Leslie remarked, “There is hardly any useful handicraft the mysteries of which she has not mastered”. Other artists who had admired her talents and tenacity included John Ruskin, William Morris, Lord Frederic Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones.

Mangle’s tea party

Asked how she managed to achieve so much, Miss Jekyll’s reply was characteristically brusque and quickwitted: “By not going to tea parties.” She made rare exceptions to this rule, however – and one of them, in May 1889 when she was 45, changed her life.