When Ned met Auntie Bumps
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
