Gertrude Jekyll on gardening

Dust jacket notes: "Penelope Hobhouse's passionate concern to communicate Gertrude Jekyll's ideas to modern gardeners is the inspiration for this book. It is a practical guide to the use of Miss Jekyll's ideas on colour and plant arrangement in the modern garden, where not only scale but labour is severely restricted. The details of her teaching are translated into modern gardening terms without losing the essence of her romantic vision or her inspired sense of colour. The idea of gardening as an isolated activity was alien to Miss Jekyll. In her own garden at Munstead Wood she not only pioneered the use of related flower and leaf colour to build up a border in the same sense as she, in her early training as an artist, had learnt to paint a picture - she also thought of the garden in terms of seasonal compartments. There was a spring garden for bulbs, primroses and emergent foliage, an iris and paeony border, her great mid-summer colour border where pale flowers and grey foliage at the extreme ends were gradually built up to strong, vivid scarlet and orange in the centre. An August garden of pretty pinks and greys and a September double border of Michaelmas daisies were separately located. In this book, while accepting modern limitations on space and labour, it is shown that the details from these separate parts of her garden, or from her numerous plans for others, can be taken and usefully adapted to small areas. Her sure sense of colour and association, and her strong preference for certain plants give a clearly recognizable 'Jekyllian' stamp to such arrangements. It is interesting to note how many of her 'preferred' plants are still considered first-class today...." Hardcover, 5.75 x 9 inches, 336 pages, illustrated with 4 colour plates, 24 black-and-white photographs, 12 drawings of garden plans; Appendix on colour theories, Index.