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8 GERTRUDE JEKYLL: CULTIVATING THE
GENDERED SPACE OF THE VICTORIAN
GARDEN FOR PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS
Christen Ericsson-Penfold
Gertrude Jekyll, ‘artist-gardener’ and horticultural journalist, was a key fi gure
in British garden design when the fi eld was gaining credibility as an acceptable
female profession at the turn of the nineteenth century.^1 Her initial training was
in the respectably feminine pursuit of botanical illustration at the South Kens-
ington School of Art. But when her failing eyesight prevented her from pursuing
a painting career, Jekyll ultimately became a garden designer, which enabled her
to transfer her training in colour and form from a fl at sheet of paper to a three-
dimensional, growing , botanical space. She used this to develop unprecedented
graduated colour schemes in fl ower borders, for which she is still known today.
Her love of fl owers and gardening, which she developed early on in her life, drew
her to this pursuit. She recalls that by the age of four, she ‘had already made
friends with the Daisies in the Berkeley Square Garden and with the Dandelions
in the Green Park’.^2 Although these were socially accepted activities for women,
her professional aspirations were unusual. Th e timeline of her career – beginning
with her fi rst article in 1881 and ending with her death in 1932 – bridges the
gap between the amateur middle-class woman gardener and the wage-earning
professional, demonstrating that she paved the way for women who followed
in her footsteps.^3 Th is chapter argues that she succeeded as the female pioneer
in her fi eld because she focused on the culturally defi ned feminine space of the
cultivated domestic fl ower garden. Th is provided her with social acceptance at a
time when female professional garden designers were non-existent.^4
Never before has Jekyll’s emphasis on the feminine space of the fl ower gar-
den as the central focus of her work been examined as a potential aid in her
professional success. As Lynne Walker argues, ‘space is not a backdrop, a neutral
container of events, or only a “site” or “location” for the construction of mean-
ing’; through cataloguing the ways in which space is occupied, it represents the
social order of the people within it.^5 Th us, by examining Jekyll’s use of the fl ower
garden, we can both understand the cultural meaning of this space and how