Sarah Mead Leonard

William Morris was a Londoner and, in his day-to-day life, he looked out on an urban, polluted Thames River landscape at Hammersmith. However, he turned away from the metropolis to pursue a pastoralist vision of the English countryside in his designs, writings, and life. This essay explores the expression of that pastoral in Morris’s printed repeating-pattern designs, arguing that those patterns are indirect representations of the landscape he most admired: the rural reaches of the Upper Thames and its tributaries. Morris’s plant motifs and visual effects reflect the botany and physical forms of the riparian environment he encountered at his Thameside country home, Kelmscott Manor. A close inspection of that landscape and ecosystem reveals not only the inspiration for Morris’s designs, but also the process by which he selected and elevated certain aspects of the countryside to create his personal pastoral. His patterns are more than decorations for walls and furniture: they are intentional, highly specific evocations of a place and an environment, deeply tied to his broader vision of a rural, equitable, and anti-modern England.

Dissertation, MA in Historic Landscape Studies, University of York, UK.

Despite her popularity in modern gardening literature and her acknowledged influence on twentieth-century garden design, Gertrude Jekyll has to date been underrepresented as a subject of scholarship in the study of designed landscapes, and many of her gardens have not been thoroughly recorded or interpreted. This dissertation shows how Jekyll garden studies might be expanded by examining two little-researched works, York’s Bishopthorpe Garth and Bishopbarns, and providing a thorough record of the gardens’ designs and current statuses, as well as analysing the gardens within the larger contexts of Jekyll’s work and legacy and Edwardian garden design and cultural change.