Gertrude Jekyll on the two hardest corners of any garden - the dry stone wall and the water's edge. How to build them, how to plant them, and what will actually thrive there.
First published in 1901 in the Country Life Library, Wall and Water Gardens runs to twenty chapters on the features that defeat most gardeners. Jekyll starts with dry-walling and terrace construction, works through the rock wall in sun and in shade, the native species that take to walling, and the problems that come with old stonework, then turns to the stream garden and marsh pools, the rock and alpine gardens, lakes, small ponds, tubs, tanks set into formal design, water margins and water-lilies. The advice is exact and unsentimental, and it comes from someone who had already made these things at Munstead Wood before she wrote a word about them.
Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) trained as a painter and came to gardening in earnest as her sight began to fail. She went on to design more than three hundred gardens, many of them with the architect Edwin Lutyens, and to write over a dozen books that changed the way English gardens were made - colour handled as a painter handles it, formal bones softened by loose and generous groups.
This edition features:Twenty chapters covering dry walls, terraces, rock and alpine gardens, streams, ponds and tanks
Species lists for walls in sun and in shade, including the wild natives that take to stonework
Construction detail: how a dry wall is laid, and how a tank or pool sits inside a formal scheme
Chapters on water-lilies, water margins and marsh pools for anyone with wet ground to work