Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [57]
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.”
But it was the voice of the woman, now sixty years dead, expressing her still-strong connection to the child inside her that sealed the deal:
“Well do I remember the time when I thought there were two kinds of people in the world—children and grown-ups. And I think it is because I have been more or less a gardener all my life that I still feel like a child in many ways, although from the number of years I have lived I ought to know that I am quite an old woman.”
By the time I left the exhibition I was in love with Gertrude Jekyll.
But then, who would not fall under the spell of a woman who, herself well-to-do, designed for no fee the gardens and interiors of the Home of Rest for Ladies of Small Means. Set in the woods of Surrey, the home was open to working women, mainly nurses and teachers, in need of a holiday. She decorated the common room of the home with ladder-back chairs, an oak table, and country ornaments. Simple things were used, she said, to keep the interior harmonious with the “simple truth and honesty” of the house’s timbered construction.
Her life struck me as reflecting the same qualities: simple truth and honesty.
I trudged back to my flat, loaded down with books by and about this extraordinary woman. I was tired but excited. More and more I saw how complicated my own life had become; how overgrown it was with thickets of worries and regrets, unearned vanities and silly insecurities. Somehow Miss Jekyll had found a way to simplify, simplify. Perhaps I could, too.
That night Jean Gillespie called to give me details about