Head Gardener Claire Greenslade took part in an expert panel for our friends across the pond, the Lutyens Trust America, who were posing the question: "How is a Jekyll garden different without Lutyens?"
Alongside Claire appeared panelist Rosamund Wallinger:
In 1983 John and I left London to buy a house in the country for a life with dogs, bantams and children. What we chose was a remarkably inexpensive, derelict Arts and Crafts house that stood in an even more derelict garden of 5 acres. I had had two successful careers; one owning and running a second-hand book-shop, the other running a small agency cooking directors’ lunches in the City. The garden was to become my third. In February 1984 an important gardening friend, Richard Bisgrove, told me that our garden had been designed by Gertrude Jekyll in 1908 for the house which was then owned by Charles Holme, founder and editor of the Arts and Crafts magazine, The Studio, and that, thanks to Beatrix Farrand, the plans survived in the Reef Point Collection at the University of California at Berkeley. We moved in in 1984 to start the enormous restoration work immediately.
For info on the Lutyens Trust, see:
