Beatrice Parsons, Spring Woods, Gravetye, Sussex, watercolor, early 1900s
ARTS AND CRAFTS GARDENS MIGHT HAVE BEEN little more than a curious trend had it not been for William Robinson (1838–1935) and Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932). Near contemporaries, their careers ran along parallel lines. Each possessed an exceptional knowledge of horticulture and each wrote more than a dozen important books, but their backgrounds and personalities were entirely different. Born in Ireland of unconventional parentage, Robinson was a shrewd businessman, while Jekyll, who was born in the more genteel environment of London’s Mayfair, was an artist at heart. Like William Morris’s Red House, their homes expressed their individuality and the fruits of their labors. Robinson’s Gravetye Manor was Elizabethan in origin and at one time surrounded by a thousand acres of bucolic fields and woodlands; Jekyll’s Munstead Wood was a more modest affair, fifteen acres of grounds enveloping a modern cottage designed by Edwin Lutyens.
Robinson was considered the prophet of wild gardening and an unswerving advocate for the cultivation of hardy plants at a time when bedding-out with tender annuals was the accepted practice in British gardens. Jekyll’s reputation rests equally on her writings and her practical work as a garden designer, while Robinson’s legacy lies primarily in the incomparable array of publications he either wrote or edited.1 His two most important books—The Wild Garden (1870) and The English Flower Garden (1883)—were perennial favorites among many generations of gardeners, and the various magazines that he edited held a wide appeal to amateur and professional gardeners alike.2
The Wild Garden, which cautioned that unmanaged wilderness was not the same as landscapes enhanced by carefree perennials, opened many readers’ eyes to the natural beauty of indigenous plants. Jekyll consulted The Wild Garden when she developed her gardens at Munstead Wood in the 1880s and 1890s, and many Americans acknowledged their indebtedness to the book in their landscape planning. Wilhelm Miller, an influential American editor and horticultural writer, formulated a style of landscape design suited to the American Midwest based directly on Robinson’s books. The English Flower Garden, compiled mainly from articles published in The Garden, a journal that Robinson edited for decades, was one of the first modern-day compilations of cultural information and design advice aimed at home gardeners. Sprinkled with line drawings by artists and pithy commentary on design matters, it was an immensely popular book. Fifteen editions of the book were published in Robinson’s lifetime, and it has been continuously in print since its initial publication in 1883.3 When Miller visited Gravetye after reading these books, he gasped at the “luxurious abandon” of its plantings and the “glorious scale” with which wild gardening was being carried out.4
In comparison with Jekyll’s worldwide renown today, Robinson’s reputation pales somewhat as a result of his dogmatic personality. Although his publications were revolutionary in their day, they lack the elegant writing style that sets Jekyll’s books apart and consequently are appreciated primarily by specialists. Robinson, however, was a master of marketing his knowledge through books and journals. More cosmopolitan than Jekyll, he visited Europe and the United States, where he met the leading botanists, horticulturists, and designers of the day. In 1870, for instance, his visit to Central Park and Mount Auburn Cemetery (known for its splendid trees and ornamental shrubs) fanned his interest in public gardens, while Horatio Hollis Hunnewell’s famed pinetum (pine arboretum) near Boston left him in awe of American gardeners.
In the 1880s, when Jekyll was just beginning to write gardening pieces for The Garden, Robinson was firmly established in the field. After the publication of Jekyll’s first book, Wood and Garden, in 1899, it quickly became apparent that her talents went far beyond mere horticultural knowledge. To her books and to the hundreds of gardens she designed, Jekyll brought the full panoply of her multiple skills as artist, craftswoman, antiquarian, architectural connoisseur, and horticulturist. The Studio noted that she had “the trained eye of an artist as well as the eloquent pen of the ready writer,” something that could not have been said of Robinson, who was basically a reporter.5 By the time Colour in the Flower Garden was published in 1908, both the author and her garden at Munstead Wood were world famous, whereas Gravetye Manor was known only to Robinson’s inner circle of friends.
In 1885, when he bought Gravetye Manor in Sussex, Robinson had already written ten books and founded at least five periodicals, of which The Garden and Gardening Illustrated were the most successful. Originally built in 1598, Gravetye Manor is ideally situated in the rolling countryside of the Weald of Sussex, with easy access by rail to Robinson’s editorial offices in London. The large stone manor house stands midway on a hill, the north side protected from the winds and the south front overlooking the expansive view. Over the years, he transformed both house and garden, publishing a detailed record of his yearly progress in Gravetye Manor, or Twenty Years’ Work Round an Old Manor House.6 For the interior renovations and additions to the manor house, he turned to the architect George Devey, whose work there greatly displeased Robinson.7 He then engaged Ernest George of the London architectural firm George and Peto, whose most famous pupil was Edwin Lutyens. Lutyens, who later designed a boathouse on one of the lakes at Gravetye, found Robinson exasperating, boring, and full of contradictions. Jesting with Reginald Blomfield one day, Lutyens suggested “cutting a statue of W. Robinson in yew as a monument to all he has done for gardening.”8
Referring to the still-simmering controversies initiated by John Sedding and Blomfield, Robinson snapped in one of his regular columns for Country Life, “There is so much phrasemongering in matters of garden design and art that it is better to deal with actual work.”9 Gravetye’s garden and landscape entailed a tremendous amount of work, including massive earthmoving and the building of walls, terraces, and pergolas. In addition to the garden and pleasure grounds, there were hundreds of acres of fields, meadows, and naturalistically planted woodlands. The pleasure grounds were initially conceived along gardenesque lines, but Robinson several years later changed the naturally sloping grade near the house to flat stone terraces that exemplified Blomfield’s stance, which Robinson had vehemently rejected not long before. Unlike Blomfield, however, Robinson dealt with the greater landscape beyond the immediate house. He wrote, “There is no reason why the garden, which in our country is so often the foreground to a beautiful landscape, should not itself be a picture always.”10
Initially the flower gardens consisted of simple beds close to the house and filled with tufted pansies, self-colored carnations, and roses, with the emphasis on the plants themselves rather than on the design of the borders. “I am a flower gardener,” he wrote, “and not a mere spreader-about of bad carpets done in reluctant flowers.” A garden should contain “the greatest number of favourite plants in the simplest way.” With that in mind, he “threw the ground into simple beds, suiting the space for convenience of working and planting, not losing an inch more than was necessary for walks.”11 Henry James left a memorable record of Gravetye’s gardens when he wrote, “Few things in England can show a greater wealth of bloom than the wide flowery terrace immediately beneath the gray, gabled house, where tens of thousands of tea-roses . . . divide their province with the carnations and pansies [and] the medley of tall yuccas and saxifrage.”12
While Robinson was fine-tuning his flower gardens, he was assiduously buying up neighboring farms and woods until he had amassed nearly a thousand acres. His great love was Gravetye’s carefully managed woodlands, planted with native plants, along with sweeps of thousands of daffodils. Home Landscapes, a companion volume to Gravetye Manor, eulogizes his woodlands. The rolling terrain of his estate soon resembled the naturalistic beauties of an eighteenth-century picturesque landscape, replete with a herd of pedigree Sussex cattle whose deep red color provided a perfect foil for the verdant countryside.
As his passion for plants consumed him, Robinson’s collection of flowers, fruits, shrubs, and trees (some of which came from America) grew to substantial proportions. His water gardens, for instance, included one of the largest collections of waterlilies in Europe, including a special tank devoted to rare specimens acquired from the French breeder Latour-Marliac. Pergolas were festooned with hundreds of varieties of his world-famous clematises. His walled kitchen garden, built in 1896, housed an unsurpassed collection of vegetables and fruits, some of which were espaliered on the walls. He paved the small garden flanking the south porch with old flagstones from London, filling the beds with plants in shades of lilac, purple, pink, and silver. On higher ground, near the north face of the manor house, he developed an azalea bank and, higher still, a garden devoted exclusively to heathers, separated by a traditional bowling green. On the south side of the manor house, a large alpine meadow was planted with masses of naturalized scillas, daffodils, anemones, and fritillarias. The east garden, off the entry court, was devoted to magnolias and other ornamental trees and shrubs, including a rare specimen, Davidia involucrata (dove tree), first introduced from China in 1904.
For many, the most breathtaking part of Gravetye was the west paved garden, brimming with tea and China roses and surrounded by pergolas, arbors, and trellises. In its heyday, the garden was given over to nearly thirty beds of roses and their companion plants, such as dianthus, violas, pansies, forget-me-nots, and carnations, whose colors were chosen to complement the gray stone manor house. In the northwest corner stands a stone summerhouse designed in 1900 by Ernest George, who also designed the pedestal for the central sundial, placed at the crossing of the two main paths paved with old stones from London rather than high-maintenance gravel. In later years, when Robinson was confined to a wheelchair, some of the paths were remade as stone ramps.
Robinson considered the west and south flower gardens, which open out directly from doors in the house, as “a larger living-room” and “in intimate relation to the house,” the stance taken by the formalists in the 1890s. “The real flower garden, where all our precious flowers are,” he commented, should be “in close relation to the house, so that we can enjoy and see and gather our flowers in the most direct way. . . . Going for a half a mile to get to the flower garden, as happens in some Scotch places, or scattering garden flowers in all directions, is not the right way,” he concluded.13
In the belief that his gardens were “full of pictures,” Robinson invited many noted landscape painters to paint them. “I have worked long and hard to prove that the garden, instead of being a horror to the artist, may be the very heart of his work,” he commented.14 Among his favored artists were Henry G. Moon, a botanical illustrator for The Garden who was renowned for his exacting depictions of flowers and his sensitive Corot-inspired landscape paintings, and Alfred Parsons, who illustrated many of Robinson’s publications and was a garden designer of some note. Moon’s drawings, which were simply executed and full of life and character, appealed to Robinson the most. His landscape paintings of Gravetye’s woodlands still hang in Gravetye Manor today.15
At Robinson’s death in 1935, Gravetye was left to the Forestry Commission, with the stipulation that there be no lectures or technical instruction, because “the trees, woods, and landscape shall be the only teachers.”16 After lying derelict for years, the manor house and thirty acres were leased in 1958 to restaurateur Peter Herbert, who proceeded to transform Robinson’s home into one of the leading country house hotels in Britain. The initial clearing of the garden took more than two years.17 All the main garden areas were refurbished, and the once-dense central flower beds in the west garden were replaced by a smooth, green lawn. More recently, the gardens have been fully revitalized in “luxurious abandon” by head gardener Tom Coward, who studied at Great Dixter, one of England’s most important gardens and a mecca for Arts and Crafts enthusiasts. Today Gravetye is a monument to Robinson’s ideals. As he said when he launched Flora and Sylva (a short-lived luxury journal with color plates by Moon), “I married Flora to Sylva, a pair not far apart in Nature, only in books.” The same could be said of Gravetye.
Jekyll’s home, Munstead Wood, can be considered the perfect expression of the symbiotic nature of house and garden. It became renowned during her lifetime through the many books and articles she wrote about it as well as through personal visits paid by admirers from around the world. Few houses better express their owner’s character than Munstead Wood, which resulted from the happy combination of a skilled architect and a determined client. The gardens did not follow a prescribed plan but evolved over time and were nearly fully developed before the house was built. When Robert Lorimer visited Munstead Wood in 1897, just six days after Jekyll moved into her new home, he commented that she had laid out all the gardens first and “left a hole in the centre of the ground for the house.”18 It was the architect Edwin Lutyens’s ingenious design that inextricably married the house with the garden.
Prior to moving to Munstead Wood, Jekyll had lived nearby with her family at Munstead House, where her keen knowledge of horticulture and unique approach to planting design quickened. The lessons she learned there later paid off at Munstead Wood.19 Robinson, whom she had first met in 1875, visited in 1880 to confer about her garden and perhaps advise on how to lay it out. Two years later, The Garden published an article about her garden, praising the long border: “Never before have we seen hardy plants set out so well or cultivated in such a systematic way.”20
Jekyll began gardening at Munstead House in 1878, while she was studying various arts and crafts, but by 1883 she had clearly run out of space. That year, she was able to acquire fifteen acres nearby, mostly of “the poorest possible soil.”21 Nonetheless, she used what natural advantages she found there, developing the former Scots pine plantation into woodland gardens and the poor field into her working gardens, reserving the central chestnut copse for the site of her house, which was not built until 1897. In the woodland gardens, Jekyll followed Robinson’s suggestions, underplanting areas with masses of rhododendrons or azaleas, and giving each path a specific interest, whether ferns and bracken or lilies, to complement the selected groupings of birches, chestnuts, or oaks. She planted rivers of daffodils along ancient packhorse tracks and established an area devoted to native heaths. Where the lawn met the woods, she planted clumps of lilies, ferns, asters, and other shrubbery edge plantings, an idea gleaned from Robinson.
As she fully explained and illustrated in Colour in the Flower Garden, Jekyll established a number of ornamental gardens devoted to flowers of one season. These included a spring garden, a naturalistic primrose garden, a June cottage garden, and September borders of perennial asters, among other flowers. Her October Michaelmas daisy borders, arranged with mounds of soft blues and purples, provided a “garden picture” in cool months that was not far from the house. Perhaps her most widely acclaimed creation was the main flower border, 200 feet (61 meters) long and 14 feet (4 meters) deep, backed by a high sandstone wall that separated it from the spring garden. The border’s complex and intricate color scheme was based on harmonious color relationships, inspired perhaps by one of J. M. W. Turner’s paintings. In the large central portion, fiery reds faded to orange and deep yellow. The colors continued to fade to paler yellow and pink, culminating at both ends with blues and lilacs in a ground of gray foliage. The whole arrangement was actually an elaborate piece of trompe-l’oeil. To reach the border, one strolled down a shaded nut walk from the house and through a pergola, emerging into bright sunlight to face a carefully arranged river of color and texture. The whole picture was clearly visible from the lawn, “the cool colouring at the ends [enhancing] the brilliant warmth of the middle and [each section] a picture in itself.”22
Two acres of Munstead Wood were given over to working gardens, including a kitchen garden, a nursery, and a large orchard, which visitors rarely saw. There were numerous cottage-style borders and hedged compartments filled with drifts of China roses, irises, hollyhocks, and her own strain of lupines in special colorations that complemented the gray clapboard barn.23 Jekyll’s large nursery supplied plants for her garden design commissions, while the kitchen garden kept the house supplied with fruits and vegetables. Next to the potting shed and greenhouses, Jekyll devoted a special garden to pansies. In the garden yard she raised lily of the valley and narcissus, which were sold at Covent Garden. Reserve gardens not only filled the house with flowers but provided valuable seeds that Jekyll sold to commercial nurseries in England and France.
In Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), Jekyll found an architect who shared her vernacular sensibilities for homebuilding and could create a house worthy of her gardens. Lutyens hailed from a small village not far from Munstead. After studying at the South Kensington School of Art (where Jekyll had studied years earlier) and working briefly in the office of Ernest George, he had just set himself up as an architect when he met Jekyll in 1889. They liked one another immediately and soon were scouring the countryside, under Jekyll’s direction, looking at old cottages and studying traditional building methods, which they avidly discussed and debated. Jekyll’s influence on the young architect is legend; when she asked him to design her house in 1892, they embarked on a fruitful collaboration that resulted in dozens of houses and gardens.
Jekyll’s love of simple materials and excellence in craftsmanship extended to the planning and building of all aspects of Munstead Wood, not only the house. One colleague extolled her “passion for matters concerning domestic architecture that almost equals [her] interest in plants and trees.”24 This love of local customs, artifacts, and buildings was recorded in minute detail in her 1904 book, Old West Surrey. Before settling on a design for the house, Lutyens built two small cottages on the site, one for Jekyll’s head gardener and the Hut, where she lived for two years while her main house was under construction. Guided by the main requirements for her house, “serenity of mind” and “the feeling of a convent,” the resulting design in 1896 brought together everything that she desired. Built of local bargate stone and timber felled on her own property, it “does not stare with newness,” as Jekyll commented in Home and Garden, nor was it a copy of an old building.25 Lutyens married a small Tudor-style manor house with a highly personal interpretation of local vernacular style. The house was at once quirky and contrived, but simple, elegant, and eminently comfortable.
Jekyll’s study of numerous crafts and appreciation for local customs influenced the furnishing of her house as well as its craftsmanship. The house is steeped in the regional Surrey vocabulary, with half-timbering, deeply hipped roofs, and plain plastered walls. Like those of Morris’s Red House, the corridors are timber-lined, with whitewashed walls and oak doors. The furnishings were simple Jacobean chests and tables, and the decorations and ornamentations were mostly Jekyll’s own handiwork. In the end, Munstead Wood may have been a large house for a single woman, but it was unpretentious and extremely suited to her.26
Katharine Montagu Wyatt, North Court, Munstead Wood, watercolor (Gloag, A Book of English Gardens, 1906)
The character of Munstead Wood was lost after Jekyll’s death in 1932, but her many books, articles, and photographs serve to keep its significance alive today. When it went out of family hands in 1948, Munstead Wood was divided up into several parcels. Both the Hut and the gardener’s cottage survive, and sections of the original working gardens have been restored. The house, principal gardens, and woodlands have been in sympathetic hands for many years. The gardens were substantially rehabilitated in the 1990s, based on a vast store of visual and written information available about the property, and they continue to be refreshed. Jekyll’s shrubbery borders, main flower border, spring garden, and seasonal color borders bloom once again.
