Maintaining cordial relations
Mary Keen
GERTRUDE JEKYLL: ESSAYS ON THE LIFE OF A WORKING AMATEUR edited by Primrose Arnander and Michael Tooley Michaelmas Books, £20, pp. 256, available by mail order (£23 inc p&p) from Vine House Distribution, Waldenbuty, Chailey, E. Sussex, BN8 4 DR, tel. 01825 723398 or from selected bookshops
Is the current appetite for the depedestalisation of famous figures a bit off? In a Spectator diary column, the Duchess of Devonshire suggested that Harold Macmillan would have considered the craving for details of other people's private lives 'unspeakably vulgar': a new volume on Gertrude Jekyll takes a similar line:
Too often biographers are apt to attribute characteristics and motivations to their sub- jects of a purely speculative nature, which bear little resemblance to the truth, and suc- ceed only in creating and sustaining myths. This is the kind of book by which Gertrude Jekyll would like to have been remembered,
writes David McKenna in his foreword. Her great nephew, and the last surviving member of her family who actually knew her, he is the father of Primrose Arnander, one of the co-editors of the book. Michael Tooley, Professor of Geography at St Andrews, with a lifelong interest in Jekyll, is the other. This is a high-minded collection of essays on the great gardener's work which may be in part an attempt by her descendants to steady her on her pedestal. Is it unspeakably vulgar to want more? The celebration of her energy, industry and talent may be as worthy as she would have wished, but one cannot help wondering — still — what sort of woman she was. This may be a failing, but we have all been spoiled by a surfeit of under-the- skin, virtual reality biographies. This habit has made it hard to be dispassionate about Great Lives anymore.
It was always frustrating that none of the modern biographers of Jekyll — not Jane Brown, Betty Massingham, nor Sally Fest- ing — were allowed access to family papers for their research. Some of the most important documents, like Jekyll's Work- book, now in the RHS Library, were not available to these writers. The majority of the fascinating illustrations that appear in the family-sponsored volume have never before been seen, and much of the research is new. In spite of this, a few people may feel that they learned more about Jekyll from hearing that she once threw her boots out of the window at a nightingale (Festing — no relation) than that she was influenced by her mother, Julia, who had a sense of order and created a comfortable, welcoming home (Freyberg — great-great-niece).
If the concept of the book is unusually lofty, much of the content is of interest. Several of the essays reveal facts about the work and techniques of the gifted amateur which help to explain her status as a gardener. Joan Edwards, an expert on embroidery, is particularly good on Jekyll's art-school training and her respect for material, 'what craftsmen call its breaking- point'. In any garden the breaking-point occurs almost daily and the best planted effects only in places where the spade is mightier than the planting plan. Jekyll's success as a designer must have been as much due to her horticultural skill as to her sense of colour.
The illustrations from the Workbook, in the chapter by Fenja Gunn, show how pre- cise and restrained some of Gertrude Jekyll's designs must have been. We think of her borders as all Michaelmas daisies, in hazy swathes, but look at her periwinkle- inspired wallpaper pattern and you realise what a disciplined hand with detail and lay- out she must have had, under the strokes of colour.
Mavis Batey, the garden historian who tells the makers of Jane Austen films what to plant, is authoritative on Jekyll in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement. She records that when describing Orchards, a Lutyens house, Jekyll wrote: It is a house that has the true home feeling — good to live and die in.' Jekyll's gardens may seem showy to us, who now lack the labour to maintain them on such a scale, but to her the importance of homeliness — a place to be — always meant more than grand display.
By far the most interesting essay for the gardener is the one contributed by Richard Bisgrove, who sets out to prove that Jekyll was ahead of her time. He records her infinite capacity for observation and goes on to support this with quotations from her own writings, which made me want to return to her books. He stresses her rever- ence for the natural world: her respect for the long, slow process of making a garden and her belief that being, part of the miracle of creation is sufficient reason for being alive. His conclusion that
her writing encapsulates a philosophy of life even more relevant now than when it was written 80 years ago
may come as a surprise to those who think of Jekyll as no more than the great manip- ulator of the herbaceous border.
I cannot pretend, in my craving for more evidence of Jekyll as a human being, that I found compelling reading in the chapter on her boots by the keeper of the Boot and Shoe Collection at Northampton Museum, nor in much of the topographical and genealogical facts divulged in other essays. This may be unspeakably vulgar. But those who respond more to facts than opinions will find plenty in the new Jekyll mono- graph, and those who like flowers and art will not be disappointed either.
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