google doodle today honours Gertrude Jekyll: The Queen of Gardens on her 174th birthday

brief video:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/gertrude-jekyll-rose-garden-google-11605817



The Summer Garden at Munstead Wood (also known as the Three Corner Garden because of its triangular shape) [Gardenvisit/Creative Commons]


Lindisfarne Castle & its Jekyll Garden. This garden was designed by Gertrude Jekyll for a friend of Lutyens [Ann Young/CC]


Hestercombe Gardens is considered to be one of Jekyll's most impressive gardens [Xlibber/CC]


Gertrude Jekyll: The Queen of Gardens
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Described as "a woman of innumerable talents" and hailed as an icon of English garden history, Gertrude Jekyll would have been 174 on Wednesday.

In her honour, Google is changing its logo to a doodle, or illustration, of her gardens.

"If not for legendary horticulturist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, the world might be a much drabber place," Google said.

In her lifetime, Jekyll created over 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and the United States.

Yet, most of her gardens are lost. A small number have been restored, including her own garden at Munstead Wood, the gardens of Hestercombe House, and the garden at the Manor House in Upton Grey.

. . . .

Gertrude Jekyll

Born 29 November 1843
London
Died 8 December 1932 (aged 89)
Munstead Wood
Nationality British
Occupation Horticulturist, garden designer, writer and artist
Jekyll's design at Hestercombe Gardens, Somerset
Hestercombe Gardens

Gertrude Jekyll (/ˈdʒiːkəl/ JEE-kəl; 29 November 1843 – 8 December 1932) was a British horticulturist, garden designer, artist,[1] and writer. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Europe and the United States of America, and wrote over 1,000 articles[1] for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden.[2] Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by the British and American gardening enthusiasts.[1]




. . . .
Jekyll was one half of one of the most influential and historical partnerships of the Arts and Crafts movement, thanks to her association with the English architect, Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes, and who designed her home Munstead Wood, near Godalming in Surrey.[3] (In 1900, Lutyens and Jekyll's brother Herbert designed the British Pavilion for the Paris Exposition.)

Jekyll is remembered for her outstanding designs and subtle, painterly approach to the arrangement of the gardens she created, particularly her "hardy flower borders".[4] Her work is known for its radiant colour and the brush-like strokes of her plantings; it is suggested by some that the Impressionistic-style schemes may have been due to Jekyll's deteriorating eyesight, which largely put an end to her career as a painter and watercolourist. In works like Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (reprinted 1988) she put her imprint on modern uses of "warm" and "cool" flower colours in gardens.

Jekyll was one of the first of her profession to take into account the colour, texture, and experience of gardens as the prominent authorities in her designs, and she was a lifelong fan of plants of all genres. Her theory of how to design with colour was influenced by painter J.M.W. Turner and by impressionism, and by the theoretical colour wheel. Later in life, Jekyll collected and contributed a vast array of plants solely for the purpose of preservation to numerous institutions across Britain. This pure passion for gardening was started at South Kensington School of Art,[5] where she fell in love with the creative art of planting, and even more specifically, gardening. At the time of her death, she had designed over 400 gardens in Britain, Europe and a few in North America. Jekyll was also known for her prolific writing. She penned over fifteen books, ranging from Wood and Garden and her most famous book Colour in the Flower Garden, to memoirs of her youth. Jekyll did not want to limit her influence to teaching the practice of gardening, but to take it a step further to the quiet study of gardening and the plants themselves.[6] Her concern that plants should be displayed to best effect even when cut for the house, led her to design her own range of glass flower vases.[7]

. . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Jekyll