Welcome Home at Last! By Michael Edwards

Surrey Gardens Trust - 1999

To have a complete set of prints of Gertrude Jekyll's drawings in this country has long been the dream of students of her work MICHAEL EDWARDS tells how, with the joint sponsorship of the SGT, those prints have finally come home to Godalming Museum.

The Gertrude Jekyll Reef Point document collection is well known. This is kept at the University of California, Berkeley and so the documents have, for a number of years, been difficult to access, partly due to the distance the originals are away from Surrey, of course, but also because the microfilm copies kept in Britain pose such a hassle to view or have a copy made for research purposes. Over the last few years the Surrey Gardens Trust has been working to find a way of financing an accessible set of prints made directly from the microfilms. Whilst the Godalming Museum has always been willing to house the documents once printed and bound, and allow visitors access to them via their reference library, the financial burden of making prints and then properly binding them prevented the Museum proceeding with the project.

At one stage there was the possibility that a fresh set of CD documents might be prepared and made accessible via computer screens. But that was too complicated and expensive, partly because of the problem of re-copying the now fragile originals and secondly the scanning direct from the 35mm negative films was likely to be very costly. Even then, studying drawings is probably best without the drawback of using computers, particularly where comparison of several documents is necessary; waiting for access to a busy library computer terminal was bound to prove a further headache in view of the likely popularity of the Jekyll collection at the Museum.

The complete printing of the microfilms, and then binding them properly to safeguard the prints, has been selected as the best way forward. This also met with the copyright needs of the various bodies associated with the material and the Museum this year formally applied to both the Surrey Gardens Trust and The Hamamelis Trust for financial support. The total cost was estimated to be £4,000 and the Museum has agreed to provide a home for the 17 volumes of drawings that amount to 2,280 individual drawn sheets as well as a loose-leaf collection for day-to-day research needs. The Surrey Gardens Trust will also have its own set of the drawings to suit its research commitments in Surrey.

A trial printing revealed many treasures which have lain in amongst the archives for a very long time and some have probably remained unrecognised, mislaid in the wrong file perhaps. As well as a significant proportion of Miss Jekyll's garden designs, there are sketches for her embroidery and carving projects plus many drawings submitted to her by architects, surveyors and owners who worked with her over the years.

The project is being supported financially by the Surrey Gardens Trust and the Hamamelis Trust jointly and, this summer, the complete set of microfilms was delivered to Repropoint of Woking for the major printing task for which they had successfully tendered. The prints have now been made and, during the autumn, collation of the documents with an indexing system will be the next task, ready for the bookbinder to complete the project.

There is naturally great excitement shared by those working on the project as well as enthusiasts, including both researchers and garden owners who, for the first time, have a chance to study the main part of Miss Jekyll's life work in a straightforward way, without enduring the pain of deciding which individual frame on which microfilm should be printed before anything can be done to improve their knowledge of a particular garden. Many discoveries are being made and lost garden drawings and maybe architect's missing plans are expected to come to the surface.

September 10, 1999