Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden first published in 1914 was the twelfth of fifteen books written by Gertrude Jekyll but it had a long pedigree. In 1882 Miss Jekyll wrote an article on ‘Colour in the Flower Garden for William Robinson’s magazine The Garden. A longer essay of the same title appeared as a chapter in Robinson’s momentous English Flower Garden in 1883. Miss Jekyll’s own books beginning with Wood and Garden in 1899 made constant reference to colour and colour planning and in 1908 Colour in the Flower Garden was published her ninth book in as many years. In 1914 a new edition was published as Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden under which title it ran through six editions before Miss Jekyll’s death in 1932. Colour Schemes is probably her best-known book and is undoubtedly one of the most influential gardening books of the twentieth century. Sadly its very success has often damaged rather than enhanced Miss Jekyll’s reputation: her writing flows with such deceptive ease that readers have too often drifted along with the prose unwittingly absorbing and perpetuating a series of half-truths. The life-long ex-perience compressed into Colour Schemes is glibly and quite inaccurately represented as a policy of dividing up the garden into a string of compartments each containing pastel-coloured herbaceous borders offering only a brief season of interest. Miss Jekyll’s own philosophy constantly reiterated was that if something is worth doing it is worth doing well. Her books were written with painstaking care and although they do make easy bedtime reading there is much more pleasure and profit to be derived from reading them with equal care. Her greatest contribution to English culture was to reassert the position of gardening as a fine art. In the eighteenth century painting poetry and gardening had been personified as the three most important Muses with gardening widely accepted as the greatest art and a constant source of inspiration for the other two. Miss Jekyll saw as a painter she wrote as a poet and she sought. (LL)