Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood

Gertrude Jekyll is well known as one of the most influential garden designers of the early twentieth century. Her books and articles on horticulture and gardening are classics. But her personal photograph albums, scrapbooks and notebooks reveal exceptional skills in photography, domestic arts, and as a businesswoman - areas of her life that she rarely wrote about and which are, as a result, unknown to all but a few. In the creation of Munstead Wood, designed in the Surrey vernacular by Edwin Lutyens, her home for over forty years, she exhibited her interest in architecture and local building skills, and her emphasis on form, grouping and colour was shown to full effect in the garden which she designed and worked from scratch.