Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman by Alice Steinbach

Author:Alice Steinbach
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9780307769824
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It was still early, so I decided to visit a museum I’d heard about: the quaintly named Museum of Garden History. One of my English friends had warned me not to miss the museum or its special exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of Gertrude Jekyll’s birth.

“Gertrude Jekyll?” I had said, pronouncing the last name Jeckul, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “The name sounds vaguely familiar but who exactly is she?”

“First off, it’s JEE-kill, not JECK-ul.” She smiled. “The ladies at the museum get quite cross when you mispronounce the name of their gardening heroine.” She went on to explain that Gertrude Jekyll was probably the most important garden designer of the century, and that most of today’s gardens were influenced by her ideas.

What my friend forgot to tell me, however, was that the museum was housed in a former church. After passing the Church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth several times, searching the almost empty streets for the right address, I was ready to give up. Then I spotted a woman who looked as though she might be a gardener: tweed suit, pleasantly weathered face, brisk stride. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know where the Museum of Garden History is?”

She nodded. “It’s just over there,” she said, pointing to a small, lovely church directly behind me.

It was cool and quiet inside the thick walls of the museum-church. Straight ahead I saw a gift shop, as cozy as a kitchen nook, where volunteers in plaid skirts and sweater sets gently presided over garden books, botanical watercolors, and assorted gifts. The museum’s collections of garden tools, historical exhibits, and fascinating photographs and sketches tracing the evolution of garden design were displayed in what was the nave of the church. There was also a space set aside for a tearoom.

I felt completely at home in this combination church and museum. It was as though the great noise of the world gave way to the soft buzzing whirr of childhood memories: of Sundays spent in church dozing off, with the thick smell of lilies in the air; of visits to Mr. Moore’s hardware store with Grandmother to buy small packets of seed with names like poetry. Heavenly Blue Morning Glory. Sweet Pea. Golden Marguerite. Black-eyed Susan. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find Grandmother there in person, wearing her pith helmet and rubber boots.

Instead I turned around and bumped into another extraordinary woman: Gertrude Jekyll. Right away I knew we were kindred spirits; knew it from the moment I heard her voice—her lucid, wry, thinking voice, that is—that was transcribed straight from her head into articles and notebooks:

“Throughout my life I have found one of the things most worth doing was to cultivate the habit of close observation,” wrote Miss Jekyll.

And: “Near my home is a little wild valley, whose planting, wholly done by nature, I have all my life regarded with the most reverent admiration.”

And: “There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming summer.

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