ONE summer’s day in 1889, the 20-year-old Edwin Lutyens went to a tea party in the Surrey hills, near the village where he had grown up. At this party, he met the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, a lady who was more than 20 years his senior, well connected and a skilful craftswoman. Conversation between them did not flow, but, as she was on the point of stepping onto her pony cart, she asked him to call on her the next day at Munstead House, outside Godalming. It was the beginning of an exceptional friendship. With her strong ideas about homes, she shaped the young man as an architect—not least by entrusting him with the design of her own home of Munstead Wood.
Impishly, Lutyens caricatured Jekyll in his letters to his wife, Lady Emily, as a stout if commanding figure, in, as he remembered, ‘a black felt hat turned down in front and up behind’. Photographs show that his sketches were not far from the truth, but Jekyll had not always been 45; as a young woman, she had been an elegant equestrienne, as well as an adventurous traveller—although friends regarded her, even then,
