The book Gertrude Jekyll wrote about her own house and her own ground: how Munstead Wood came to be built, what she grew around it, and what she made indoors when the weather shut her out.
Published in 1900, Home and Garden is a book of notes rather than a manual. It opens with the building of Munstead Wood, the Surrey house Edwin Lutyens designed for her in the 1890s, and takes the reader through timber, brickwork and the pleasure of watching country craftsmen at work. Then it moves outside and through the year: a wood ramble in April, a garden of wall-flowers, brier roses, midsummer, roses and lilies, rock gardens large and small, wild ferns, the kitchen garden. Along the way come chapters on cut flowers, conservatories, the making of pot-pourri, plants for poor soils, gardening on a short tenancy, the workshop and its hand tools, and the cats who shared the house with her.
Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) trained as an artist and turned to gardening in earnest in middle age, as her eyesight failed. She designed more than three hundred gardens, wrote over a dozen books, and left behind a way of making a garden - drifts of colour, firm structure loosely filled - that English gardeners still follow. This is the most personal of her books, and the one that comes closest to her own voice.
This edition features:Twenty-three chapters of notes on house, garden and workshop, first published in 1900
The building of Munstead Wood, the Surrey house Edwin Lutyens designed for the author
Seasonal chapters on wall-flowers, brier roses, lilies, wild ferns and the kitchen garden
Working advice on cut flowers, conservatories, poor soils and gardening on a short tenancy
A method for making pot-pourri, a chapter on hand tools, and one on the cats of the house