Gertrude Jekyll was born in London on 29 November 1843 to Julia and Edward Jekyll, a former Grenadier Guards captain. When she was four, her family moved to Bramley in Surrey, where she developed a strong interest in gardening and the natural world. From an early age, she experimented with planting and began thinking about how colour could be sustained throughout the seasons.

Educated mainly at home, Jekyll studied at the South Kensington School of Art from the age of seventeen. Her time there fostered her interest in art, design and craftsmanship, and she became particularly influenced by John Ruskin. She immersed herself in London’s artistic and cultural life, visiting galleries and theatres and studying painting. She also developed skills in embroidery, textile design, gilding, wood carving and decorative arts.

Jekyll travelled extensively throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, often with friends, and became fascinated by the plants she encountered. She regularly brought bulbs and seeds home from her travels, further developing her horticultural knowledge and interests.

In 1875, she met the influential gardener and writer William Robinson. They shared a dislike of the fashionable Victorian practice of formal bedding schemes – see Lyme Park – promoting a more natural style of gardening. Their friendship and shared ideas would have a lasting influence on Jekyll’s approach to garden design.

Following her father’s death in 1876, Jekyll’s family returned to Surrey, the landscape she had always considered home. Mrs Jekyll bought twenty acres at Munstead Heath  – at last, Jekyll had the freedom to design a garden from scratch.

As well as an orchard, a kitchen garden, lawns and shrubberies and a small parterre near the house – Jekyll created what would become her most innovative feature: a long herbaceous border to the south of the kitchen garden. Jekyll treated the border as a work of art, using plants to create harmonious combinations of colour, texture and form that changed with the seasons. It wasn’t that she rejected bedding plants altogether, but that she had a remarkable understanding of colour theory and how different hues worked together. William Goldring, head of the Herbaceous Department at Kew visited Munstead House and was deeply impressed: “The brilliancy of the border… was beyond anything we had hitherto seen in the way of hardy flowers—as different from the ordinary mixed border as night from day.”

Through a neighbour, Jekyll met a young architect at the start of his career: Edwin Lutyens. Years later, recalling that first meeting, Lutyens—more than twenty years Jekyll’s junior—wrote: ‘It was in 1889 that Mr Harry Mangles asked me to meet his remarkable friend, Miss Jekyll. I eagerly accepted the privilege. She was already celebrated in the gardening world, and by her ever-growing circle of devoted and appreciative admirers…. She was dressed in, what I learnt later to be, her Go-to-Meeting Frock – a bunch of cloaked propriety topped by a black felt hat, turned down in front and up behind, from which sprang alert black cock’s-tail feathers, curving and ever prancing forwards.’

It was the beginning of one of the most celebrated creative partnerships in British history.

In 1883, Jekyll had bought a 15-acre site to the north of Munstead House. Referred to as OS – short for “other side” of the road – she had already begun laying out the garden. She wanted a cottage for her gardener, as well as a dedicated space where she could pursue her many crafts. And who better to design both buildings than her new acquaintance, Edwin Lutyens? The workshop, known as The Hut, provided a workroom on the ground floor, with two bedrooms tucked away in the attic. [Both these buildings are now in separate ownership]

After her mother died in 1895, Jekyll’s older brother Herbert inherited Munstead House while Jekyll moved into The Hut. But the garden at Munstead Wood, as it became known, was never intended to stand alone. Jekyll had laid it out around the site she had chosen for her future home, so it was only natural that, when the time came to build, she turned to Lutyens. She gave him a clear brief: every room was to enjoy a view, and the house was to be neither “poky nor screwy nor ill-lighted.” The result delighted her. She later wrote that Lutyens had “conceived the place in exactly such a form as I had desired but could not have described.”

The interior woodwork, reminded me of Lindisfarne and dotted throughout there are examples of Jekyll’s work – for example inlaid doors and cupboards.

Some parts of the garden have changed, but many of Jekyll’s original ideas remain: the carefully framed views from the house, the winding walks, the changing colour through the seasons, and that unmistakable balance between structure and naturalness.

There are over 30 different areas of the garden but as visits are currently limited to group tours, these are the areas I saw on my visit.

The first part of the garden we were shown, was the Fernery, followed by the azalea garden which has 247 varieties some of which are unique. Silver birch are dotted around the garden – one of Jekyll’s favourite trees – while the rhododendrons are underplanted with lily of the valley. Spring bulbs, flowering shrubs and evergreen planting ensured there was always something to catch the eye.

Perhaps the best-known feature at Munstead Wood is Jekyll’s famous flower border, immortalised in a painting by her friend, the artist Helen Allingham – they had both studied at South Kensington Art School. Jekyll described how the border had ‘a definite colour scheme; at the two ends blue, white and palest yellow with grey foliage; and purple, white and pink, also with grey foliage, respectively; the colour then advancing from both ends by yellow and orange to the middle glory of strongest reds’.

For Jekyll, colour relationships were essential – the opposite of the Victorian fashion for planting beds in rigid blocks of colour and patterns. Her advice was always to study nature and to focus on beauty:

‘It is a curious thing that people will sometimes spoil some garden project for the sake of a word. For instance a blue garden for beauty’s sake may be hungering for a group of white lilies, or for something of palest lemon yellow, but it is not allowed to have it because it is called a blue garden and there must be no flowers in it but blue flowers… any experienced colourist knows that the blues, will be more telling – more purely blue – by the juxtaposition of rightly placed complementary colour.’

The Nut Walk begins with double rows of hazel trees planted in a zig-zag pattern forming a tunnel leading to the Pergola which links the different parts of the garden together. Later in the season, the nearby Michaelmas daisy borders take centre stage, producing a striking display of white, pink, lilac and purple that carries colour well into autumn. Although part of the Nut Walk was lost during the twentieth century, there are now plans to restore it.

Jekyll’s love of nature extended far beyond gardening. She once told her nephew that she could identify a tree simply by the sound the wind made in its leaves. It is therefore no surprise that she asked Lutyens to design a small building where she could sit and watch thunderstorms. Known as the Thunder House, it stands at the end of the orchard at Munstead Wood and still survives today – although it is now cut off from the rest of the garden it can be seen from the road.

No one knows for certain how many gardeners worked at Munstead over the years, but when Thomas Frank Young arrived in 1926 there were five. Every morning at ten o’clock, the Swiss head gardener, Albert Zumbach, would receive his instructions from Jekyll before setting the day’s work in motion. Young and Arthur Berry worked in the pleasure gardens, Bill Boxall and Freddie Hawkes tended the vegetable garden while Jarot, the groom, was responsible for the pony, which not only kept the grass cut but also pulled Jekyll’s trap.