Gertrude Jekyll: A vision of Garden and Wood, Judith Tankard and Michael van Valkenburgh, 1988

An academic study of Jekyll (1843-1932) the leading garden designer in Victorian and Edwardian England.  Working at Munstead Wood in Surrey with Edwin Lutyens, England’s leading architect of the period, Jekyll created a new style of gardening featuring the herbaceous perennial bed, and ultimately designed over 400 gardens in the UK and US.  She was also an accomplished early photographer, and this book features 83 of her more than 2100 photographs held in archives at UC Berkeley.  Jekyll, in her words,  created “places of temporary perfection expressed in fleeting moments of beauty”.  The authors state that “Sometimes a garden’s greatest solace lies in the place it holds in our memory