Tea with Miss Jekyll

GRAHAM STUART THOMAS perhaps the greatest gardener ever was for many years gardens adviser to the National Trust. It was not his only career, because he started his working life as a nurseryman and ended it as the author of many of our most influential books about plants and gardens. But his work for the Trust established the principles by which some 120 gardens were planted, managed and enjoyed. He would have been thrilled to learn that the Trust recently acquired Munstead Wood.

- Charles Quest-Ritson

Thomas left home in Cambridge in 1931 to work for a nurseryman in Chobham. One weekend, soon after his arrival in Surrey, he cycled over to Munstead Wood, near Godalming, to visit Gertrude Jekyll, who had for more than 30 years been England's best-known gardener. Enthusiasm, knowledge and energy are attractive qualities. Jekyll liked young men who exhibited these attributes and she treated Thomas with kindness. She bade him look around by himself, pick a piece of any plant that he wished to talk about and come back to the house for tea.

Thomas was completely enthralled by Jekyll's main flower border, 200ft long, where the colours moved from cool to strong and back to cool again at the far end -its solidity bolstered by shrubs, architectural evergreens and tender plants in pots plunged into the ground to carry the composition through from midsummer to late September. He had never seen anything like it before. Jekyll's border had been 40 years in the making, constantly refined and replanted as she assessed and exploited all the ornamental possibilities of every plant she grew.