Photographs by Robert Freidus. Formatting, perspective correction, and caption material by George P. Landow, with text by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web.
A variety of skimmia, keeping its winter berries even after its fragrant flowers have appeared.
Hestercombe Gardens Cheddon Fitzpaine, Taunton, Somerset TA2 8LG. Designed by architect Edwin Lutyens with planting schemes by Gertrude Jekyll, 1904-06. [Click on this image and those below to enlarge them.]
Jekyll's planting schemes provided the vital complement to Lutyens's geometric layout of the formal gardens, and everywhere contributed to the gardens' beauty. With the general and mutual benefits of their collaboration in mind, Lawrence Weaver writes,
Architects find in gardens a just sphere for design, but they cannot be expected to have a wide knowledge of horticulture. Miss Jekyll added to this knowledge an intimate sense of design, and Sir Edwin’s association with her in the joint labour of design and planting led not only to splendid results in individual gardens, but also to the widening of his outlook on the whole question. It was an ideal partnership. It is in the main to Miss Jekyll that we owe the rational blending of the formal and the natural in garden design, which has harmonized the theories of two contending schools. [11]
Left: Bluebells carpeting the ground beneath the trees. Right: Magnolia starting to bloom.
When it came to choice of colours, the paintings of J. M. W. Turner were a particular source of inspiration for Jekyll (see Bisgrove 5787). She had studied his paintings while at the Central School of Art in Kensington, and his work would be a lifelong influence, to the extent that in some examples given by Richard Bisgrove her planting schemes are linked to specific paintings. But of course colour was not the only consideration. As Bisgrove points out, "[b]alancing colours, forms and textures through time, and given the vagaries of the British weather, was not an easy task" (5788). But it was one which she was hugely successful in fulfilling.
Pergola and steps alike, at one with nature. For another view of curving steps, beside the curved ends of walls, click here.
Left: The skimmia, its fruits, flowers and glossy leaves shown in close up at the top of the web page, seen here in its setting: the flowers contrast brilliantly with the red berries. Right: Steps, a necessity for a garden like this on different levels, become a recurrently pleasing feature.
What is particularly wonderful about Hestercombe is that its late twentieth-century restoration could be based on some of Jekyll’s original planting plans. One set came to light in a potting-shed drawer, and further plans were found in a gardens collection at the University of California, Berkeley, where the American landscape architect, Beatrix Farrand, had deposited them: "New research stimulated a major reassessment of the planting of the Great Plat and it was subsequently replanted in 1998" ("Restoration"). This has enabled visitors to experience the gardens much as originally envisaged by Jekyll herself.
Related Material
- I: Hestercombe Gardens
- II: The Orangery, Dutch Garden and the pergola
- III: The bigger picture: existing features, and design motifs
Bibliography
Bisgrove, Richard. "The Colour of Creation: Gertrude Jekyll and the Art of Flowers." Journal of Experimental Botany. 64/18 (2013): 5783–5789.
"Hestercombe." Historic England. Web. 26 October 2018.
"Restoration." Hestercombe: Paradise Regained (the Hestercombe Trust's own website). Web. 26 October 2018.
Weaver, Lawrence. Lutyens Houses and Gardens. London: Offices of Country Life, 1921 (first published 1913). Internet Archive. Contributed by the Getty Research Institute. Web. 25 October 2018.
Last modified 26 October 2018