Customer Reviews

Gardeners Ess Gertrude Jekyll (Godine Country Classic)

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This book has become my bedtime reading material. It offers an excellent summary of Jekyll's views on color, plant selection, the layout of beds and the philosophy of the garden. While I would have liked detailed drawings or layouts of the various gardens discussed, her written descriptions feed the imagination. I've already laid out a new garden border as a result of the insights gained, and I am inspired to read other works by Jekyll and others

Although her words are timeless and invaluable, I did not realize that this is a reprint of text only, not one black and white, not one illustration, not even a single diagram. Years ago a friend lent me his collection of her books, complete with wonderful photographs and garden plans, and that's what I expected. Very disappointing.

For this quote alone it is worth acquiring The Gardener's Essential by Gertrude Jekyll:

"...the song of the nightingale and the ring of the woodman's great axe gain a rich musical quality from the great fir wood. Why a wood of Scotch fir has this wonderful property of a kind of musical reverberation I do not know; but so it is. Any sound that occurs within it is, on a lesser scale, like a sound in a cathedral. The tree itself when struck gives a musical note. Strike an oak or an elm on the trunk with a stick, and the sound is mute; strike a Scotch fir, and it is a note of music." p.121

Please Comment if you have heard such a sound, or know where such a wood is to be found, if at all at this time...Seems of another enchanted age...

Another sample from the multitude of quotes that causes this book to still be read and that helps one become just a little more alive in Nature:

"...the quality of that mysterious and delicious smell given off by the dying strawberry leaves, aromatic, pungent, and delicately refined, searching and powerful, and yet subtle and elusive- the best sweet smell of all the year. One cannot have it for the seeking; it comes as it will - a scent that is sad as a forecast of the inevitable certainty of the flower-year's waning, and yet sweet with the promise of its timely new birth." p. 194