INDEX gardens The perfect team: Lutyens & Jekyll
The Salutation in Sandwich, a partnership between architect Edwin Lutyens and gardener Gertrude Jekyll, is well worth a day trip, as head gardener, Steve Edney, explains
Edwardian gardens at the turn of the century but is of course best known for his houses. He was a prolific architect and used certain styles in certain periods.
E
DWIN LUTYENS designed (or part- designed) many
Some people have said to me The Salutation doesn’t look like any other Lutyens house they have seen before. They say that the clear Queen Anne style, with its huge chimneystacks, differs from some of his earlier work. Beautiful cottages like Munstead Wood and places such as Great Dixter (a place very close to my heart and a great garden for late summer colour), were built by the architect as was Great Maythem Hall at Rolvenden, which unmistakably looks like a larger version of The Salutation but for the gardens. Here, they used strong lines that criss- cross each other and have
implemented A little history...
The Salutation was built by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1911-1912, with Gertrude Jekyll believed to have been involved in the garden’s design, as a weekend retreat for
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William Gaspard and Henry Farrer. The current owners took over in 2004, by which time The Secret Gardens were in a total state of neglect; where the charming White Garden stands was once a pile of rubble and the Holm Oak
symmetrically designed linear avenues. At the relatively small garden here (it’s three-and-a- half acres), the area is cleverly carved up from an odd boundary line into a series of symmetrical ‘rooms’ with straight lines everywhere. It was up to his clever friend
Gertrude Jekyll to soften these linear designs with planting. I would say that so few Jeykll gardens remain true to her plans that most people wouldn’t know what is and isn’t ‘Jeykll’. A visitor stopped me next to Jeykll’s long border last week to tell me that he didn’t think the garden was very Jeykll. I asked why he thought this. He said, looking at the long border, that she wouldn’t have had all these strong colours flanked by pastels. I replied that this was in fact one of her most famous designs for her own garden at Munstead Wood and we copied
Walk was totally overgrown. While the spirit and style of the original garden has been largely captured, several more modern features have been added, such as the Tropical Border. The plants that grow in this sheltered section
Visiting The Secret Gardens at The Salutation, Knightrider Street, Sandwich, Kent CT13 9EW are open seven days a week to the public from 10am to 5pm. See
www.the-secretgardens.co.uk
the layout as per the original documents. So yes, Gertrude did follow the colour wheel but she didn’t eliminate colours. Instead she rigorously followed the colour wheel theory. Most gardens (ours included) are, at best, Jeykll-esque in style; I think it is far more important to follow her ideas and ethos for gardening than to try and plant- for-plant replicate something long gone. That is what I do at The Salutation and you can be the judge of whether you like the style we use.
i
would simply not have been able to cope with the colder climate back in 1911. Within this area you’ll find horticultural delights such as the Wollemi Pine, an incredibly rare plant that dates back to the Jurassic period.
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The INDEX magazine october 2011
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