For most of the past 100 years, American gardeners have not challenged English gardening maven Gertrude Jekyll’s definition of “good taste” when it comes to perennial garden design.
This influential lady developed the English border as an alternative to the Victorian’s formalized “bedding out” schemes, where flowers were arranged in mass displays much like the colors on a paint-by-number canvas, a practice that is still de rigueur in municipal parks.
To this day, sophisticated gardeners pay homage to Jekyll by turning up their collective noses at such plantings, declaring them garish and déclassé.
Much of what we believe to be Jekyll’s legacy is not her doing. When I read her landmark book “Color Schemes for the Flower Garden,” first published in 1908, I was surprised to learn that Ms. Jekyll was a fan of strong texture. While we think that including tropicals, desert plants and grasses is a fairly modern innovation, she incorporated bold plants like cannas, dahlias, yuccas and ornamental grasses into her designs. Jekyll also came to the defense of bedding annuals such as scarlet geraniums and lobelias, plants already out of favor at the turn of the last century, contending that “It wasn’t the plant’s fault that they have been overused or employed in dull or even stupid ways.”
I do, however, have a problem with Gertrude Jekyll’s reverence for her topic. There is not even a hint of a giggle in her musings. The grand dame of horticulture had no use for the mundane or the mediocre. Gardeners have a duty – her word – to elevate gardening to a fine art. I suspect she meant well, but her legacy has become our gardening id – that little voice that leaves us fretting over our duty to good taste.
The result is that most of us play it safe, making pretty but not very bold gardens. Pastel “English gardens” predominate because pastels are darned difficult to screw up. Gardeners get all kinds of weird advice concerning color from contemporary designers.
One writer warns that “red, orange, yellow and blue crammed together into tight quarters looks jumbly.” Huh? Or “white is rarely right with scarlet since it makes the planting look stark as a flag.” My favorite is “white should stay away from magenta, mauve, and fuchsia since it makes the flowers look like dingy lingerie.”
We can’t blame Jekyll for all of this goofy advice. She didn’t write it. She just set the stage when fear of doing the wrong thing hinders us and makes us hesitant to try something daring.
It’s a shame, because innovation occurs not when we follow someone else’s advice but when we strike out in new directions. I often wonder how she would react if they knew that, in her name, all forward progress in perennial garden design stopped in 1921. It’s one thing to be inspired by the past, another entirely to slavishly repeat it in perpetuity.
Within the bounds of social responsibility – who wants to live next to a lawn of bindweed? – gardens are where we should be able to express our individuality with complete freedom. If they make us giggle occasionally, so much the better.
Marcia Tatroe is a garden writer and lecturer. Her most recent book, “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West,” ($29.95, Johnson Books), is in bookstores now. E-mail her at rltaurora@aol.com.
