JEKYLL (GERTRUDE)
Illustrated autograph letter signed (“G. Jekyll”), to her life-long friend, the garden writer William Robinson (1838-1935), thanking him for his book My Wood Fires (“…It is so good a thing to look at that I found myself straying from the sense of the letterpress to admire the print and paper and wood cuts and the whole ensemble. I do envy you your wood fires [at Gravetye] and all their accessories – Wood to burn is here an expensive luxury…”), and sketching the Swiss wood hotte or log-holder which she has installed in her workshop and lobby (“...Forty logs can be stacked in them & they take very little room – I had one from Switzerland and had it copied by a wheelwright in good tough ash...”); after lamenting the death her “dear old friend” James Britten, Keeper of the Botany Department at the British Museum (“...we always had great talks about books and good English and oddities of language – Besides he was a man of infinite humour of the best kind and a good comrade all round...”, she ends by promising to send some plants for one of his rose beds; together with a postcard photograph of a Swiss wood hotte, 2 pages, 4to, small split at central horizontal fold, Munstead Wood, Godalming, 11 October 1924
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