120 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
women could get their hands dirty and perform physical labour without lower-
ing their social status. As Davidoff and Hall state, women could ‘even display
some aggression against pests and weeds’.^16 As a self-proclaimed amateur fl ower
gardener, Jekyll was able to become a respected household name for fl ower gar-
dening, a professional garden designer, and a successful business manager of
her own plant nursery. Th e garden became a space where she was able to claim
responsibility for developing herself both professionally and personally.^17
When she began pursuing garden design, there was no professional train-
ing available for women, which could have infl uenced her decision to study
botanical illustration rather than horticulture. Female agricultural schools were
founded aft er her career had become well established.^18 In 1895, the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew, began allowing women to work as gardeners.^19 With the
increasing number of women training in the fi eld, Jekyll’s work and publications
became greatly infl uential, both in Britain and in the United States. In Massa-
chusetts, the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women used
Jekyll’s ‘Colour in the Flower Garden’ as a primary text for students studying
colour border plans, Jekyll’s speciality.^20 By the twentieth century, an increasing
number of women were becoming professional gardeners, following the lead of
Victorian women such as Jekyll who were at the forefront of developing a profes-
sion for women gardeners.^21 For Jekyll, fl ower gardens were the growing canvas
upon which she applied her aesthetic vision. She taught herself horticultural
skills through years of practice but she applied her formal artistic training to
garden design and referred to her work as ‘painting a picture with an immensely
long-handled brush’.^22 Th is self-created space became the key to her professional
success, and through her writings she provided inspiration to countless others.
‘[A]dapt[ing ] the Language of Domesticity’^23
In addition to her practical skill in garden design, Jekyll was also a prolifi c writer,
publishing more than a thousand articles and thirteen monographs in her
51-year career.^24 Close examination of changes in her articles over time indicate
traces of her subtle tactics to enter into the gardening profession as a woman
without causing too much stir from the largely masculine fi eld or from her more
conservative readers. Jekyll’s writing career began one year aft er William Robin-
son, key contemporary gardening journalist and editor for the Garden, came to
view her fi rst large-scale garden design, the fl ower borders at her mother’s home,
Munstead House. Recognizing that his good opinion could help to establish
her reputation in the fi eld, Jekyll spent years laying the groundwork for his visit,
revealing a subtle but forthright act of self-promotion. She arranged to meet
Robinson in his London offi ce fi ve years before, in 1875, and had begun plan-
ning the garden well before the family moved there in 1877.^25