Gertrude Jekyll 129
Conclusion
Jekyll was a driven and talented woman who succeeded in a profession few
women had previously attempted. Jekyll’s focus on the feminine subjects of
fl owers and domestic space (the garden being an extension of this) enabled her
pursuit of a profession in the masculine fi eld of gardening. Her horticultural
writing provided an outlet for disseminating her knowledge and ideas, a method
of promoting her acceptance as a professional female. Jekyll’s last words on the
subject might be that it was her lifelong love of, and devotion to, the fl ower gar-
den that ultimately provided her with the tools to succeed.
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches
industry and thrift ; above all, it teaches entire trust. ‘Paul planteth and Apollo
watereth, but God giveth the increase’. Th e good gardener knows with absolute cer-
tainty that if he does his part, if he gives the labour, the love, and every aid that his
knowledge of his craft , experience of the conditions of his place, and exercise of his
personal wit can work together to suggest, that so surely as he does this diligently and
faithfully, so surely will God give the increase. Th en with the honestly-earned success
comes the consciousness of encouragement to renewed eff ort, and, as it were, an echo
of the gracious words, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’.^68Although this was possibly her heartfelt belief, this passage, yet again, dem-
onstrates Jekyll’s keen understanding and successful application of acceptable
feminine attributes: patience, faith and humbleness. Furthermore, by claiming
the gardener as male, Jekyll acknowledged her awareness of the overwhelming
majority of men within her fi eld, implying a strategic respect for these peers who
held sway over her own reputation and career. As Festing writes, her ‘assumed
quiescence comes from a woman who well understood how to manipulate a
tricky world’.^69 She used her contacts, or boldly created new ones, as she did with
Robinson, to assist in the development of her career. She published articles that
demonstrate her use of writing as a soapbox to propagate her ideas and as a place
of advertisement for and promotion of her own income-earning business – her
plant nursery at Munstead Wood. In both her writing and her designs, Jekyll
was largely at the forefront of the Victorian debate on the role of the garden in
art and design, indirectly promoting these feminine subjects as avenues through
which women could pursue a profession. In this way, she pushed the boundaries
of what were considered typical pursuits for a late-Victorian woman of comfort-
able means. Her professional success can be partially attributed to her tenacity,
drive and insistence on independence. As a result of her ambitious aims to stake
new territory as a self-proclaimed artist-gardener, she worked her way to the
forefront of the fi eld. She was a woman ahead of her time, utilizing conservative
traditions to achieve her pioneering ambitions. Th e fl ower garden provided her
with an acceptable medium that, as Morgan would argue, enabled her to adapt
the social parameters of femininity to include the professional career she sought.
By stretching the boundaries of the ‘spaces of femininity’, but not breaching
them altogether, Jekyll established her own ideological parameters and, in so
doing, ultimately cultivated her own success.^70