ainter, photographer, author, and handicraft aficionado extraordinaire, Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) is remembered primarily as a Renaissance woman with an especially keen interest in gardening and garden design. Over the course of her life, she created or offered guidance on by Francis Jekyll, a nephew, was published in 1934 and contains the circa-1880 portrait of Jekyll reproduced here. In Christopher Hussey’s , the biographer claimed that Jekyll was “perhaps the greatest in horticulture and garden-planting that England has produced.” His use of is telling, since she herself used similar language at the end of the 19th century, writing, “Planting ground is painting a landscape with living things.”
