Gertrude Jekyll's Artistic Gardens

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a history talk about a Gilded Age property, and there was part about how back in the nineteenth century, guests would have approached this cottage, which was of course really a mansion on this winding road that would give little glimpses of the estate through the trees, and I thought, you know who. I've been meaning to do an episode of the podcast about that British garden designer who worked on all those famous estates that our old coworker Christopher told me about that guy that had a really funny name. I could not remember the guy's name beyond the fact that it struck me as funny in that moment, to be I was not in England, I was in Massachusetts. But there were parallels to the way this property was being described in what this guy's garden designs were like. So when I got home, I googled the following British garden designer with a funny name. This seemed very straightforward to me, Google did not come back with Lancelot Capability Brown, which is who I had been thinking of. Instead, Google thought that British garden designer with a funny name must mean Gertrude Jicyl, and I got totally sidetracked on Gertrude Jicyl. And that's today's episode. So maybe we'll come back to Capability Brown someday, not today though today. Gertrude Jicel Gertrude Time. Gertrude Jicel was born on November twenty ninth, eighteen forty three. She was the fifth of seven children born to Edward Joseph Hill Jicel and Julia Hammersley. This was a well established upper middle class family lived very comfortably thanks to an assortment of properties and investments and inheritances. Gertrude's father was a captain in the British infantry unit known as the Grenadier Guards, but he retired early because of his health. This family is a great example of how upper middle class could mean having a lot of money, So much money you didn't have to work and things were fine. Yeah, and you had a hall staff in a very big house. When Gertrude was born the family lived in London, they regularly visited the green park next to Buckingham Palace. She later said that her earliest clearest memories of London were of the grass and the flowers, including the dandelions, which she really loved, but which her nurse told her were nasty things. I have feelings you can talk about behind the scenes. Let's do it. In eighteen forty eight, when Gertrude was five, the family moved to an estate called Bramley House in Surrey, and the children did a lot of rambling and exploring the countryside. Because Gertrude's only sister was seven years older than she was, her closest companions were her brothers, too older and too younger, and she was particularly close to her younger brother, Herbert. She later wrote quote, it was therefore natural that I should be more of a boy than a girl in my ideas and activities, delighting to go up trees and to play cricket and take wasps nests after dark, and do dreadful deeds with gunpowder, and all the boy sort of things. She was independent and high spirited, and her father called her his little oddity. As an adult, she would simultaneously defy and follow conventions about things like gender and propriety, like climbing up ladders while wearing a billowing dress as a male gardener down below held it steady with his back to her. The children were educated at home with governesses from Germany and France, and then the boys eventually went off to boarding schools. Gertrude also spent a little time at a boarding school for girls that was opened in the area, but her parents withdrew her from that school pretty quickly for reasons that aren't really documented. They framed her brief time at this school as a failed experiment. I'm wildly curious. Once all of her brothers were away at school, Gertrude spent a lot of time left to her own devices. Her parents were also both musicians, and her father had a particular interest in science. Gertrude helped him in his workshop, tinkering and building things, and she learned pretty much anything the workers around her home and the rest of Bramley would teach her, including thatching, wall building, and how to shoe a horse. The family also hosted a lot of famous and influential guests, including Michael Faraday and Felix Mendelssohn. Growing up in a house full of mostly boys and wandering in the woods and tinkering in a workshop sounds like it might have been a really boisterous existence. But Gertrude really hated noise. One day when she was young, she came down to breakfast without her boots because she had thrown them at nightingales that were singing outside of her window and keeping her awake. She didn't like loud dogs or loud children. A nephew later described her as having a nervous response to noise that was outside her control. She also liked her solitude. She claimed the garden shed as a personal refuge, and she would scatter cinders onto the path as she went out to it because her father, who also apparently could not abide noise, hated the sound and feel of walking on them. This shifted a little as she got older, though she still detested noise and avoided children and liked her solitude. But as an adult she also had lots of friends and took great care in maintaining those relationships. A couple of years into living at Bramley, Gertrude had an almost mystical experience looking out a stretch of yellow presses. As an adult, she described feeling the same sensations while wandering in a primrose wood, smelling the fragrance of the flowers and feeling the warm spring air. Quote when I see and feel and hear all this for a moment, I am seven years old again, and wandering in the fragrant wood, hand in hand with the dear God who made it, who made the child's mind to open wide and receive the enduring happiness of the gracious gift. So as by direct divine teaching, the impression of the simple sweetness of the primrose wood sank deep into the childish heart and laid, as it were, a foundation stone of immutable belief that a father in heaven who could make all this, could make even better if he would when the time should come that his children should be gathered about him. So it's pretty obvious that Gertrude was really interested in flowers and gardens and nature as a child. She also had a fondness for science and music and art. In eighteen sixty one, at the age of eighteen, she enrolled at the National School of Art in the South Kensington district of London. One of her classmates was Susan Mery Mackenzie, who became a lifelong friend. Today this is the Royal College of Art and it had been founded in eighteen thirty seven as the Government School of Design, and its courses included a focus on both art and design. After enrolling at the school, Jiegeles spent her time between studying art in London and enjoying the countryside in Surrey, and in both places she was always really active and really busy. She also started traveling, including a trip to the Mediterranean with Charles and and Mary Newton in eighteen sixty three. Charles was an archaeologist and keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, and Mary was an artist. Gertrude and Mary's friendship was sadly cut short when Mary died of measles in eighteen sixty six at the age of thirty three. During this trip, Ortrude really fell in love with the gardens and plant life around the Mediterranean, and she started collecting samples to send back home and try to grow there. Of course, this is a fairly common practice at this point, even though it could be destructive to the ecosystems that the plants were being taken from, and it's something that Jicyle continued to do as botanists and horticulturists became more vocally critical of the practice in later decades. Yeah, obviously, some of these plants also can be in damative Yeah, in other places they're introduced to. In eighteen sixty five, Jekle was exhibiting her artwork at places like the Royal Academy and the Society of Female Artists. This artwork has not been the subject of as much study as her gardens, though, because a lot of it was in family collections and largely out of the public eye until the nineteen nineties or later. Like, I read a biography of her that was written prior to this that was like, well, we don't know what any of her art looks like, and then I found scans of a lot of it. A lot of her study of art included copying other artists' master works, and she was reportedly a very good copyist. Some of her copies still exist and are in the collection of the Godalming Museum. There were also times when her instructors used her artwork as a reference or as an example for other students. Art critic and polymath John Ruskin described her painting Yahoo driving Furiously as quote very wonderful and interesting and for a while that was all anybody had to go on. Did not know what it looked like, but now you can see a picture of it online. Jicel was always very fond of cats, and there is a painting of her cat Thomas as the character of Puss and Boots in the collection of the Godalming Museum as well. Some of her work is also in the collection of the Surrey History Center. Jicyle finished her painting of Tom as the Cat in eighteen sixty five, and that same year her sister Caroline known as Carrie, got married. The departure of her only sister from the household meant that Gertrude was expected to take up a bigger share of the domestic work, and this seems to have been really hard for her. The Jeagles were a close knit family, but Gertrude also had interests of her own. She was more interested in studying art than trying to run a household, and her sister's marriage also emphasized that the expectation was for Gertrude, who was aged twenty two at this point to marry as well. She seems to have spent more of her time in London after her sister's marriage, perhaps to try to get away from those expectations. In eighteen sixty eight, the Jakle family moved from Bramley House in Surrey to Wargrave Hill in Berkshire. This was a property that had been passed down through the family and it had become vacant after the death of a tenant. Even though Gertrude had not been living at Bramley House full time, she was really sad to leave it. She had fallen in love with the landscape of Surrey and she just wasn't as fond of Berkshire. However, this move did give her a new creative outlet. She was tasked with redecorating the house, with her parents seeing it as a way to encourage her creative side, and this involved everything from sourcing furniture and decorative objects to designing draperies and wall coverings for the house herself. We'll get in some more on that after a sponsor break. We said earlier that Gertrude Jeekles's family was comfortable and well respected comfortable means pretty rich, though, This meant that there were a lot of prominent visitors to their home at Wargrave Hill, people who took notice of the work that she had done on its interior design. Soon other people were asking her for her help and redecorating their own homes. This included Hugh Grovener, first Duke of Westminster, who asked Jekyll to decorate Eton Hall, which had been newly rebuilt under architect Alfred Waterhouse. The Duke wrote to her that quote, I don't see how without your advice it can ever be satisfactorily accomplished. This was paid work, which meant that it had to be handled delicately. It was not considered appropriate for a woman of Jicyll's economic class to work or to present herself as having a profession, and she got around this by describing herself as an amateur, which also meant that she was paid much less than a man of comparable ability would have been paid. It also helped that much of this work was done for friends and acquaintances who heard about her work by word of mouth or just by visiting one of the homes she had decorated. Other clients for her interior decoration and design work included Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Louise, and artists Frederick Layton and Hercules Brabazon. Brabazon was another of Jekle's lifelong friends, and through the eighteen sixties and seventies she made connections to a lot of other British artists and artisans. This included William Morris, who she visited for the first time in eighteen sixty nine. Morris was a social reformer, a poet, an artist, and a designer whose work included textiles and wallpapers. Morris was a key figure in the Arts and crafts movement in Britain. This was an esthetic and reform movement that developed in response to the Industrial Revolution and a perception that mechanization and industrialization had led to a proliferation of unattractive and badly made goods. The Arts and crafts movement focused on making things by hand and doing it well. Many in the movement also advocated for the idea of the unity of the arts, that there really was no distinction between fine art and decorative art. It all required skill and care, hair and craftsmanship, and all of it brought beauty into the world. Yeah, there's a big focus on creating should be joyful and it all matters. Uh. That choked me up to say. Gertrude Jiegel had a lot of connections to the arts and crafts movement, and these ideas had a big influence on her work. She incorporated a lot of handcrafted pieces into her interior designs, and she learned to make a lot of different things herself. She had a particular focus on painting and embroidery, but she also learned skills like metalwork, wood carving, gilding, inlaying, and embossing, and she practiced all of this in a workshop she set up for herself at home. She was just continually learning how to do new things and then finding ways to incorporate any new skill that she learned into her other creative work. She also made an ongoing study of the world around her and how people were using decorative objects and archetecl ure and design. Some of this was actually difficult because of her eyesight. She had myopia, so nearby objects were clear, but objects farther away were blurry, and she wore heavy eyeglasses with steel rims to correct her vision as much as possible. Even though her close up vision was clearer, doing fine detail work caused her a lot of eye stream, and the changes in her vision were also progressive, so this was something that she was often very worried about. In addition to all her study and design work, Jicyle continued to travel, including a trip through France, Italy and Algiers that lasted for more than five months. She set out in September of eighteen seventy two when she was twenty nine. And Algiers she was once again struck by the plant life, particularly these large architectural plants that were used as focal points in some of the gardens. She continued to make things as she traveled, particularly during the coldest part of the winter months, when she and her companions were spending more of their time indoors, and she painted and sketched the people and places she saw. Jigel had always been interested in plants and gardening, and she started to focus more on that after returning from this trip. At some point she had started redesigning the gardens around Wargrave Manor. She was also working with the plants that she had gathered, both from her trips to other countries and from the countryside around where she lived, propagating them, breeding them, and working to develop improved cultivars. In eighteen seventy five, Jigell visited Irish gardener and journalist William Robinson at his office. Robinson had published books on gardening, including Alpine Flowers for Gardens and The Wild Garden. He had also established a weekly journal called The Garden four years before. At this point, Gertrude was interested in gardening and garden design, and she wanted to learn more. Her visit with Robinson marked the start of a friendship that would turn into a professional relationship six years later, when Jeekles started contributing articles of her own to The Garden. In eighteen seventy six, Gertrude's father, Edward died, Her mother, Julia, decided to return to Surrey, although not to Bramley House. For one, it wasn't available, but even if it had been, the family was a lot smaller now. In addition to their father's death, Gertrude's three other siblings had all gotten married and moved into homes of their own. Julia decided to have a new house built to her specifications, and she commissioned architect John James Stevenson. While the house was being built, the family lived in a house in Bramley Village. Their new home, known as Munstead House, was in Munstead Heath, and Gertrude designed the gardens. She had already started to think of gardens as works of art, and now she works toward applying everything she had learned about art and design so far in her life to her designs for the gardens. This was something that developed over the course of Jekyll's career as a landscape designer and architect. She really learned by doing observing the plants and keeping careful notes on how they grew and what they did. Year after year. She incorporated color theory into her designs, including the colors of flowers and of their foliage. The colors of her gardens typically moved from cool to warm and back again, and they were intentionally planted to change with the seasons, with the plant's life cycles being a part of how the garden looked and grew. So, for example, if a flowering plant typically withered and died back after it bloomed, she might plant it alongside ferns that would conceal those fading stems, or she might plan for potted plants to fill in the spaces left by plants that died back later in the season. One of the garden elements that Jingle became really known for was her herbaceous borders. These are long stretches of beds that ran along things like walls or paths, typically not much wider than the gardener's arms reach, to make things easier to maintain. She of course did not invent the idea of herbaceous borders. People had been planting things alongside walls and paths for as long as they had been gardening. But she did put a lot of thought into the use of color and texture in these borders and the sizes and shapes of the plants. It wasn't just about the flowers looking pretty. She used color, space, and texture to create a sense of perspective and distance, the way a painter can use light and color and shadow to create a sense of depth and dimension in a painting. Sometimes she used a lot of different flowering plants to get the effect she was looking for here, so, especially when it came to very large gardens with a lot of borders, this was something that required a whole team of gardeners to maintain. Within a few years, Jekyl was applying this philosophy of gardening to property of her own. She purchased about six hectares that's almost fifteen acres of Munstead Wood across the street from her mother's home. She made that purchase in eighteen eighty two. She knew that when her mother died, her brother Herbert would be the one inheriting the house, and since he had recently gotten married, he would be moving in with his family. Gertrude was not married. There's really no record of her ever having a romantic relationship with anyone, at least not in material that's publicly available, so she needed to plan for a house of her own. She didn't get started on the house right away, though, She gardened in Munstead Wood, planning around a space where a house would eventually go. By this point, Jkyl was publishing articles about gardening in William Robinson's journal, The Garden and in other publications. As the changes in her eyesight continued to progress, she also became an avid photographer, taking pictures of the plants end of her gardens. She used these as illustrations for her work. She developed these pictures herself in her own dark room, and it's estimated that between eighteen eighty five and eighteen eighty eight she took at least nine hundred photographs intended for publication. That doesn't sound like many when we how have phones that have cameras on them and we can take nine hundred pictures of a cat in a day. These were like film pictures that were developed and prepared. In eighteen eighty nine, Jikell meant architect Edwin Lutians, who, at the age of twenty, was just starting his career. They meant for the first time when Jicel was having tea with a neighbor, Henry Mangles. Jikkel and Lutiens became friends and collaborators for years. There was both a partnership and a mentoring relationship, with the much younger Lutians referring to Jicyl as ant bumps, and Jikyl connecting him to potential clients for his architecture work. In eighteen ninety one, at the age of forty eight, Jikel went to an eye doctor because she was concerned about the changes in her eyesight and she was also having a lot of headaches. The doctor advised her to give up things like painting and embroidery that required close up detail work. She did continue to do all of these things for the rest of her life, and she was an avid reader, but she had to limit her time with this kind of close up focused work. She instead became increasingly dedicated to gardening rather than to other arts and crafts, and her words quote, when I was young, I was hoping to be a painter, but to my lifelong regret, I was obliged to abandon all hope of this on account of my extreme and always progressive myopia. We're going to talk about more about her gardening and her collaborations with architect Edwin Lutiens after a sponsor break. Gertrude Jeekle's first home at Munstead Wood was known as the Hut and it was designed by Edwin Ludiens in eighteen ninety four. This was a single story home with whitewashed walls and an oak beam roof covered in simple tile, and she seems to have genuinely loved it. At the same time, though, this was always meant to be a temporary home, and when her mother died the next year, getting into a bigger house became more urgent. The construction site for this bigger house, which she called Munstead Wood, was inside of the hut, just basically right next to it, and she was fascinated by the whole building process. This Tudor inspired home was finished in eighteen ninety seven, and the house and everything in it were inspired by the principles of the arts and crafts movement. It was made from local stone and timbers and built by local crafts people, and she meant for it to look as though it had grown from the gardens, and it was built to suit her needs and interests. There were seven bedrooms, including her room, guest rooms and bedrooms for her staff, as well as a dark room, a workshop, a writing room, and a flower shop meaning a workshop for flowers. By the time Munsteadwood was finished, Jikyle had become widely recognized for her work in gardening and horticulture. In eighteen ninety seven, she was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honor by the Royal Horticultural Society. This was Britain's highest horticultural award and she was the first woman to be so honored. In eighteen ninety nine, she published her first book, Wood and Garden Notes, and thoughts practical and critical of a working amateur. About a third of this book was expanded from a column called Notes from Garden and Woodland that Jicele had published in The Guardian over the previous few years. Most of the photographs were ones that she took herself in her own gardens. The book was based on her own experiences at Munsteadwood and it was full of practical advice for gardeners. The first twelve chapters are arranged by the months of the year, covering flowers that bloom during those months, as well as garden tasks that need to be handled by the season. After the month by month chapters are ones for things like large and small gardens, beginning and learning, colors, scents, weeds, and other more general topics. There's a chapter titled the Worship of False Gods and she discusses how the popularity of gardening had led to a big focus on what she calls florists flowers, that is, the kinds of flowers that have their own societies and shows, like tulips, dahlia's and chrysanthemums. But quote I do most strongly urge that beauty of the highest class should be the aim and not anything of the nature of fashion or fancy, and that every effort should be made towards the raising, rather than lowering of the standard of taste. Jigell wrote this book in the midst of a huge division in the world of British gardening, sometimes described as hard or soft, or the formal school versus the free school, broadly speaking, on the free school side was William Robinson, who Jicel wrote for, who thought that gardens should be wild and that the plants should be the focus. And on the formal side were John's Setting and Reginald Blomfield, who thought that a garden is an extension of the house and should follow the principles of architecture and rules of design that a house should follow, with the garden itself more formal and tightly defined. Again, broadly speaking, the free school had a focus on flowering plants, while the formal school emphasized features like topiaries and neatly trimmed hedges. Jigel was really somewhere in between these two schools. She definitely thought the house and the garden should work together, and this was really a big part of what drove her ongoing collaborations with Edwin Lutien's her gardens, though, often had very carefully planned elements that had a very free or almost wild look about them, like imagine the English country garden that just seems to have a profusion of all kinds of different flowering plants. But this was in a structure of more formally defined paths and features. These approaches to gardening were hotly debated through the eighteen nineties, and Jicyl wrote in eighteen ninety six quote within the last few years, just such another war of controversy has raged between the exponents of formal and the free styles of gardening. And again it is to be regretted that it has taken a somewhat bitter and personal tone. The formal army has hurled javelins, poisoned with the damning epithet vulgar. The free has responded with asseguyes imbued with an equally irritating ignorant Both are right and both are wrong. Throughout all of this, Gertrude Jekyl was busy over the course of her career as a landscape architect and garden designer. She designed or consulted on at least four hundred gardens about one hundred of them as collaborations with Edward Lutien's. Their work together was hugely influential within the arts and crafts movement and in setting trends of what English houses and gardens were supposed to look like. She was writing books and articles, including a gardening book for children in nineteen oh two, which she did in spite of her general dislike of how loud they were. In nineteen oh four she also published a book called Old West Surrey, documenting what life had been like in that part of England in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was also a really avid observer of life and a collector of ordinary objects related to country life. She donated a lot of this collection to the Surrey Archaeological Society in nineteen oh seven. Nineteen oh four, Jikyl did her work almost entirely by correspondents. She made her last visit to London that year, and after that she rarely left home. She would write letters with sketches and thorough descriptions of the plan, using vellum overlays to add her notations to architectural plans and other designs. In the early twentieth century, Jekle established a commercial Plant Nursery at Munsteadwood to make sure that she always had the plants she would need for a client's designs, and to discourage the gardeners who would actually be building and maintaining those gardens from making substitutions. She ran this nursery until nineteen thirty two, and she continued working on her own breeds of plants during that whole time. She was also part of the movement for women's suffrage. She was elected Vice president of the Godalming branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in nineteen oh nine. One of her surviving works of embroidery is a banner that she made for the society. World War One marked a shift in Jeekle's life and work. A lot of her writing about gardening was meant to be practical and accessible to anybody who had a little patch of green space to grow things in, and some of her design commissions were for spaces as small as individual window boxes, But a lot of her commissions were for the types of estates that had a whole gardening staff. This included her own home at munstead Wood, which had a staff of at least ten gardeners. The exact number is not really clearly documented. It also seems like she had some critics who just intentionally inflated their estimates of how many gardeners she was employing to make it seem like the things she was advocating were totally out of reach. During World War One and later the Great Depression, people had less money and other priorities than paying for garden labor. In the wake of a bunch of social and economic changes, a lot of Britain's stately mansions and country estates were also no longer occupied or no longer employing a giant paid staff. Jikle worried that she might have to give up munstead Wood, but she got a donation from the Garden Club of America that helped her keep going. She also started keeping chickens during the war, which continued after it was over. She planted more food crops at munstead Wood, and she wrote about how other people might do the same in their kitchen gardens. She also organized collections of sphagnum moss, which was used as a surgical dressing because of its antimicrobial and absorptive properties. Flowers from Jicyl's nursery were sent to the continent to be used at burial sites for Allied soldiers after the end of the war. In nineteen twenty, Edward Lytiens convinced Gertrude Jekyl to sit for a portrait, something she was really reluctant to do. She had never really been fond of her body or her appearance, to the point that she called herself unpaintable. She also had so much to do during the day, and she just refused to lose any daylight hours sitting for a portrait, so William Nicholson painted her by lamplight in the evenings. Nicholson spent some of his time during the day painting a still life of her well worn men's balmeral boots, which she wore for gardening. One source that Tracy used in this episode said she had acquired these boots all the way back in eighteen eighty three, and they were definitely well worn. She said in a nineteen hundred letter quote, no carpenter likes a new plane. No house painter likes a new brush. It is the same with clothes. The familiar ease can only come of use and better acquaintance. I suppose no horse likes a new collar. I am quite sure I do not like new boots. The painting of the boots is in the collection of the Tate Museum today, and the boots themselves are in the collection of the Guildford Museum. The portrait is on display in the National port Gallery in London. By the time this portrait was painted, Jicyl was in her late seventies and was spending one day each week resting in bed. On the advice of a doctor, she chose Sunday as her day of rest. Her other days were tightly scheduled to allow her to both work and recover from working. But she was generally opposed to various labor saving devices that were introduced in the early twentieth century that might have made her work in the gardens a little less tiring. She was set in her ways in this aspect. She did, however, get a radio the year she turned eighty. Jkyl was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Viitch Gold Medal in nineteen twenty nine for quote persons of any nationality who have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture. In nineteen thirty, at the age of eighty six, she wrote forty articles for Gardening Illustrated, even though she said she couldn't see her own handwriting anymore. By this point, she was no longer able to create huge garden plans, but she still took commissions for flower boarders. Her doctor ordered rest and perfect quiet during her off hours to allow herself to continue working. In the last summer of her life, Jekles started using a wheelchair, which was given to her by Edwin Lutiens, and she really loved the mobility that she had reclaimed with it. Gertrude's brother, Herbert, died on September twenty ninth, nineteen thirty two. She had been the closest to him of her siblings, and they had by this point been neighbors for decades. It seems like she approached the deaths of other family members in a fairly stoic way, but Herbert's loss was particularly hard. Gertrude died a few months later, on December eighth, nineteen thirty two, at the age of eighty nine. She died in the arms of her maid, Florence Hayter, who had worked with her since nineteen oh six. Her last words were reportedly peace, perfect peace in Jesus Christ. Gertrude Jiceyl was buried at Buzbridge Church near Gadalming. Edwin Lutiens designed her grave marker and a family monument. The family monument describes her and her brother Herbert as quote longtime dwellers in their homes at Munstead, who passed their rest in the autumn of nineteen thirty two. Their joy was the work in their hands. Their memorial is the beauty which lives after them. Herbert's widow, Agnes, was buried with them after she died in nineteen thirty seven, and the memorial also reads quote also of Agnes Jgel, whose spirit ever dwelt in loving kindness. Gertrude's individual gravestone, also designed by Lutiens, reads artist, gardener, craftswoman. Jigel remembered four household staff members and her will, including Florence Hayter, and left the rest of her estate to Agnes. The family sold most of the estate to raise money for the Red Cross relief effort during World War II. Many of Jekyll's papers and garden designs were bought by landscape architect Beatrix farrand Farand and her mother had visited Jekyl from the United States during her lifetime, and Farrand was deeply inspired by Jekyll's work. After Faran's death, these materials were left to the University of California at Berkeley. Many of Jekyll's notebooks are in the collection of the Gottalmy Museum, which also has copies of a lot of these materials that are in the collection at UC Berkeley. During her lifetime, Jekyl published fourteen books along with well over one thousand articles. She produced six volumes of photo notebooks containing roughly two thy one hundred images, many intended for use in her own publications, and they're arranged chronologically, beginning in eighteen eighty six and ending in nineteen fourteen with Britain's declaration of war on Germany. She developed at least thirty strains of plants, and she sent sea eds to various botanical gardens with the hope that they would be preserved. Many of her strains no longer survive. Some that do include a Columbine known as Munstead White Munstead Lavender, a love in a miss known as Miss Jicyle, and Gertrude Jicylvinca minor. There's also an Old World rose named for her, but it's named in her honor, not one of her breeds. Yeah. I think one of the sources that I read said that six of her strains still survived out of roughly thirty or so that she created. Jicyl designed more than four hundred gardens during her career. As we've said, most of these are in the UK, but some are in other parts of Europe. There are thirty two gardens associated with her on England's National Heritage List today, and a few of them either were maintained with her design or are being restored to her design. These include the gardens at Munstead, Linda's Farn Castle, Hestercombe, and the Old manor House at Upton Gray. There is one remaining garden in the United States of the three that she designed, and that's at the Old Glebe House Museum in Woodbury, Connecticut, which commissioned the garden from her in nineteen twenty six. You can't get there from here on the train, but I have this on my list of like a sometime future Connecticut field trip. In twenty seventeen, Jekyl was honored with a Google Doodle for her one hundred and seventy fourth birthday. Just last year, in twenty twenty three, the UK National Trust acquired Munstead Wood, which is currently undergoing restoration. We'll end with a couple of quotes from her work that I just found very dear. Quote the first purpose of a garden is to be a place of quiet beauty, such as will give delight to the eye and repose and refreshment to the mind. That was from a Gardener's Testament, which she wrote toward the end of her life. The other is from Wood and Garden quote the size of a garden has very little to do with its merit. It is merely an accident relating to the circumstances of the owner. It is the size of his heart and brain and goodwill that will make his garden either delightful or dull, as the case may be, and either leave it at the usual monotonous dead level, or raise it in whatever degree may be, towards that of a work of fine art. As Gertrude Jekyl. She's a delight. I'm quite fond of her. Yeah, do you have a listener? Mail? Also, I do you have a listener? Mail listener mail about Humphrey Davy. This email is from Larry, and Larry wrote to say, I thoroughly enjoyed your podcast and have learned some interesting things. I'm about an episode behind in real time, but appreciate your podcast and my rotation. As a young man in the early nineteen eighties, I worked in the coal mines to put myself through mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri Ralan now Missouri S and T. It appears that Davy won out in the long run. We used safety lamps to supplement the electronic methane monitor of the day, which would false alarm occasionally, and we're mounted on the machinery, being too heavy to carry. The safety lamps in use were proudly tagged with a coined brass label stating Davy Safety Lamp. To miners of the day, the visual feedback of the flame was much more comforting than an electronic black box. The safety lamp readily detected two of the three damps terms still use today. Firedamp, as you pointed out in the pod, is methane, which caused the flame to grow and become more blue. Black damp is poor oxygen content in the atmosphere, causing a shorter, more yellow flame or in extreme cases, an extinguished flame. The third ist white damp, which could be detected by an experienced miner using the lamp and the symptoms of exposure. Often the lowest effective technology is most helpful. Here's my obligatory pet photo. Here is Cole. He turns one this week. Cole is a very very like. I see a lot of people posting pictures of black cats with the note that they are avoid This is a dog void of just inky, solid black coat on this dog within the first picture a very happy, long tongue panting expression. Second picture just sacked out next to the door. Love it, I love it. So thank you so much Larry for this. Larry ended upy saying today is writing out a thunderstorm with a tornado warning. So thank you so much Larry for sending this, for thanking us for our hard work. 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