128 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
states that Jekyll ‘would pick a spot and sit there for a while, saturating herself in
its sights and scents. Th en she would begin an article’.^62 Examples of Jekyll drawing
information and inspiration directly from the source are evident in articles such
as the ‘Sun and the Poppies’, from June 1887. She comments on the recent bout of
extremely sunny weather and the reaction she has seen in her plants.
Certainly the fl owers that love a grilling are having a ‘good time’. But the high tem-
perature and burning sun (rarely veiled by cloud) of the last week or more has shown
how few fl owers can bear it without showing some signs of distress. Th e Oriental
Poppies seem least of all able to withstand it. Th e fl owers that open in the morning
are burnt white for half the depth of the petal by midday, and the next day nothing
is to be seen but a little blackened rag. Th e variety bracteatum stands better, per-
haps from the greater thickness of the petal. Th e early-fl owering Clematises are much
burnt; Tea Roses are bleached aft er their fi rst hour or two – Fortune’s Yellow turned
to a washy pale buff , and all fl owers go off as if in a hurry to get out of the world
much hotter than they expected.^63Not only is she providing advice to her readers regarding fl owers that can stand
the weather and those that cannot, Jekyll is clearly demonstrating knowledge
gained from keen and up-to-date observation. Gates continues by stating that
‘[w]hat emerged from these sittings were not just basic how-to essays but a
unique kind of aestheticized nature writing’.^64 It was this willingness for com-
plete absorption in her medium that caused her writing to speak to its reader
with more clarity, and allowed her garden designs and the plants she chose for
them to work closely and eff ectively with their natural surroundings.
Many of her aesthetic intentions are based upon her deep sense of place and
appreciation for the local people, whom she saw as working in harmony with
nature. Upon her family’s return to west Surrey, where she lived during her child-
hood, Jekyll renewed her appreciation for the location and its people. She travelled
through the Surrey countryside collecting items of rural daily life. In 1904 she
published a book entitled Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories, which dis-
cussed and somewhat romanticized ‘Surrey’s vernacular traditions’.^65 Jekyll saw the
countryside and nature as both her medium and her inspiration. Helmreich states
that the photographs Jekyll printed in her articles as supporting illustrations for
her text ‘transformed common rural sites and activities into pictorial views and
thus endowed the landscape with new values for her intended audience’.^66 Her use
of subtly applied aesthetics to artistically enhance her natural material created a
seamless combination of both natural beauty and trained artistic skill. Gates elo-
quently summarizes what she considered to be one of Jekyll’s two primary credos,
the outcome of her marriage between nature and art: ‘Th e garden is ... a place
to which we can repair to restore ourselves ... a site of artistic intentionality ... a
place where ... vision c[an] fi nd one of its fi nest expressions’.^67 From this accept-
ably feminine space she found inspiration and an artistic medium, the plants and
designs which she shared with her readers and clients for fi ft y-one years.