What Is the Gertrude Jekyll Official Website?

gertrudejekyll.co.uk is the official website of the Jekyll Estate, dedicated to the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932). It is a reference and orientation site rather than a shop or booking platform: it gathers information on her life, career, gardens, books and articles, her collaboration with the architect Edwin Lutyens, and her place in the Arts & Crafts movement. Use it when you want a starting point for researching Jekyll, finding a garden to visit, or locating where her notebooks and drawings are held.

Who runs the site and who it covers

The site identifies itself as "The Official Website of the Jekyll Estate." Its subject is Gertrude Jekyll, who according to the site created or advised on more than 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and America, and whose influence on garden design remains widespread. She spent most of her life in Surrey, latterly at Munstead Wood near Godalming, where she ran a garden centre and bred many new plants.

That estate affiliation matters for how you treat the content: it is an authoritative family/estate source for biographical and bibliographical orientation, not an independent critical review.

What you can find on the site

The navigation, as listed on the homepage, is organised into clear sections:

Two practical points stand out. First, the Gardens section is organised by travel practicality — "within one hour of London," "one hour or more from London," and "outside Britain" — which is useful if you are planning a visit rather than reading biography. Second, the site notes that some of her gardens have been faithfully restored, wholly or partly, and can be visited, so the garden listings are the place to check before travelling.

Where the archival material actually is

The site is explicit that it is not the repository for original material. According to its homepage:

• Godalming Museum holds many of her notebooks and copies of all her garden drawings, compiled and sorted by members of the Surrey Gardens Trust.
• The original drawings are at the University of California, Berkeley.
• The Surrey History Centre, Woking holds much material about her and the Jekyll family, including copies of her garden designs.

So the site works best as a finding aid: confirm what exists and where it is held, then approach the holding institution. If you need to consult an original drawing, plan around Berkeley; if you need notebooks or working copies, start with Godalming.

What the site tells you about her output

The homepage gives a compact summary of her written work: her own gardening books are widely read in modern editions, she contributed over 1,000 articles to Country Life, The Garden and other magazines, and a complete list of every book and article she wrote is maintained in the Books section. For anyone building a reading list or checking a citation, that bibliography page is the most direct reason to use the site.

When this site is the right starting point — and when it isn't

Choose it if you want an estate-authorised overview of Jekyll's life and career, a structured list of her publications, help choosing a Jekyll garden to visit based on travel distance, or pointers to the museums and archives holding her papers and drawings.

Look elsewhere if you need critical or independent assessment of her work, current opening times and ticket prices for individual gardens (the site describes gardens as visitable but the homepage gives no prices or booking details), or access to the drawings themselves — those require the holding institutions named above. The site also lists external links, which is the sensible next step once you have identified what you need.