Student Work
Title
Gertrude Jekyll’s Main Flower Border
Project Description
Livia’s Garden Room is a semi underground room painted on all four sides with scenes from an idealized garden. The frescoes depict a layered immersive environment in which the painted walls present a vivid three dimensionality. Starting from a marble fence, the garden is laid out on the ground level with regular clumps of flowers, then shrubs and fruit trees rise higher, and finally taller trees behind them. The frescoes show all plants in bloom simultaneously, despite the fact that in reality they would bloom at different times of the year. In a similar fashion, Gertrude Jekyll designs her Main Flower Border as a series of layered flowers and plants. Colors are distributed in a linear fashion throughout the 200 feet long and 14 feet wide border, beginning at each end with cool colors, and ending with warmer colors at the center. The garden is bounded by a solid wall covered for the most part with taller shrubs and trees. These trees act as a background for the flowering plants in front. The border presents wild size and height variations for the plants, making it a true volumetric composition. While shown in full color, the flowers bloom from June to September. The chromatic separation, as well as the sectional quality of Jekyll’s design makes the Main Flower Border a realized version of Livia’s Garden Room. This model of Jekyll’s Main Flower Border analyzes the similarities between the flower border and the paintings in Livia’s Garden Room by studying their chromatic and volumetric qualities.