Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. He designed over 150 gardens across Europe and the United States over a career spanning 70 years. Some of his most notable projects included the Caveman Restaurant at Cheddar Gorge, Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, the Kennedy Memorial Garden at Runnymede, and Sutton Place Garden in Surrey. Jellicoe pioneered the idea of landscape architecture as an art form and drew inspiration from nature, classical influences, and the human subconscious in his designs.

1. A PRESENTATION ON
SIR GEOFFREY ALAN
JELLICOE (1900-1996)
Presented By:
Ankit Mittal – 17M801
Rajat Nainwal – 17M809
M. Arch, NIT Hamirpur

2. • Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe was one of the 20th
century's leading landscape architects with a
career spanning almost seventy years.
• Jellicoe grew up in the coastal town of
Rustington amongst the rolling Sussex Downs
with his father, a publisher and an opera –
loving mother, both were sophisticated gardeners.
• A trained architect, town planner, landscape architect and garden designer his
strongest interest was in landscape and garden design, describing it as "the
mother of all arts".
• After a traditional classical education, which led to a lasting love of Roman
and Greek philosophers, Jellicoe trained as an architect from 1919 at the
Architects Association School in London .
Sutton Place

3. • He was a founder member of the Institute of Landscape Architects , he was
president from 1939-1949, and the International Federation of Landscape
Architects of which he was Honorary Life President.
• As part of his final year of architectural studies, Jellicoe visited Italy and as
a result wrote an authoritative book on Italian Renaissance Gardens.
Throughout his life this influence was reflected in his work and can be seen
at Ditchley Park through to the designs for Sutton Place.
• Jellicoe's long and rich career saw the creation of many projects, from
Cheddar Gorge in 1934 to the Kennedy memorial at Runneymede,
considered to be one of his greatest works.
• Water was a recurring theme in many Jellicoe designs, sometimes still and
reflective and in others energetic, a rushing waterfall down steep slopes
adding another dimension to the design.

4. • After formally retiring, Jellicoe
developed his ideas on the link
between design and the sub-
conscious, studying the works of
Carl Jung. He felt the contribution
of our sub-conscious when
appreciating design was wholly
underrated or ignored.
• Early in his career, Jellicoe was familiar with the work of modern artists
and felt empathy with abstract work. He enjoyed successful relationships
with the artist Ben Nicholson, who provided the concluding sculpture for
Sutton Place in Surrey , and was influenced by Paul Klee. His work can
also be seen at Cottesbrooke and Mottisfont.
Ditchley Park

5. PROJECTS
• 1934-36 Caveman Restaurant, Cheddar Gorge, Somerset.
• 1934-39 Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire
• 1935 Plan for Calverton Colliery, Calverton, Nottinghamshire
• 1936 The Great Mablethorpe Plan, Lincolnshire
• 1947 Plan for Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
• 1951-52 East Housing Site, Lansbury Estate, Poplar
• 1952 Church Hill Memorial Garden, Walsall, West Midlands
• 1956 Harvey's Store Roofgarden, Guildford, Surrey
• 1957-59 Water Gardens, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
• 1959 Cliveden Rose Garden, Taplow, Buckinghamshire
• 1964-65 Kennedy Memorial Garden, Runnymede, Surrey
• 1970 Shute House
• 1979-89 Hartwell House Garden, Buckinghamshire
• 1980-86 Sutton Place Garden, Surrey
• 1984 Moody Gardens, Galveston, Texas, USA

6. CAVEMAN RESTAURANT (1934-36)
• The Caveman
Restaurant, at the
entrance to the Cheddar
Caves, is flourishing
but Jellicoe's 'fish pond'
glass roof is said to
have leaked and was
replaced with a solid
roof.
• The seating and design of the restaurant suggest a gateway to the
underworld.

7. • He designed one of the last Italian gardens in England at Ditchley
Park.
DITCHLEY PARK (1934-39)

8. DITCHLEY PARK (1934-39)
• Statues were brought from Wrest Park.
• The knot / parterre has gone but the rest of
the garden survives in good condition.

9. • The garden has been renamed and restored,
on the roof of what is now the House of
Fraser Store in Guildford High Street.
• It was designed to symbolize the flight of the
first sputnik and overlooks Guildford and the
North Downs.
HARVEY’S STORE ROOF GARDEN (NOW HOUSE OF
FRASER) (1956)
• The garden features many
grasses, Iris varieties, willow,
Ligularia, Persicaria, and
Eupatorium, and water plants
(Scirpus, Juncus, etc).
• The plants tend to build toward
late summer for their best show.

10. HARVEY’S STORE ROOF GARDEN (NOW HOUSE OF
FRASER) (1956)
• The garden, seating and viewing platforms were
spectacular. The public could walk through the
pond garden on stepping stones, and a waterfall
cascaded down the south side of the building.
• In 2008, many the plants put in 2000 had
outgrown their space and had to be removed.
• The upper pond has also been converted into a
gravel filter bed for the water circulating
through the garden.
• In 2000, the store was taken over by House of Fraser and an ambitious building
project was undertaken, resulting in the atrium in the front of the store. At this
time the garden was re-made in the spirit of the original.

11. • Cliveden stands on a high wooded plateau overlooking the River Thames.
• The name "Cliveden" (formerly Cliffden or Clyveden) means "valley among
cliffs".
CLIVEDEN ROSE GARDEN (1959)

12. • The Rose Garden's planting design is based on Lord Astor's original
aspirations to create a garden that absorbs its visitors, through the
introduction of tall roses in the outer beds and shorter roses on the inside.
• The repeat flowering roses gently phase from pale yellows in the east
through vibrant oranges to deep velvety reds in the west.
CLIVEDEN ROSE GARDEN (1959)

13. • A memorial garden, for President John F.
Kennedy. The acre of land on which it is set, a
gift to America, overlooks the valley in which
Magna Carta was signed.
KENNEDY MEMORIAL (1964-65)
• Jellicoe designed a flight of steps, rising
through the woods to reach a glade in which the
memorial stone is set. It draws upon The
Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's allegory of life as
a journey.
• This was a key project in the development of
Jellicoe's view on the role of the subconscious
in landscape design.

14. • Sir Geoffery was commissioned in 1970 to create a water garden and the result
was Shute House Gardens. It has been restored and developed by the present
owners, John and Suzy Lewis, when they arrived in 1994.
SHUTE HOUSE GARDENS (1970)
• The narrow formal channel of flowing
water surrounded by high, clipped yew
hedges recalls enclosed gardens of Persia.
• A diversion of the River Nadder, the water is
channelled into a series of canals, pools and
waterfalls. Each waterfall has a series of copper
chambers of varying dimensions, the moving water
emitting different notes in the musical scale.

15. • The water cascades into octagonal,
square and hexagonal pools, each one
with a bubbling fountain in the centre.
All of them had to be painstakingly
restored.
SHUTE HOUSE GARDENS (1970)
• Shute House shares its deliberately
restricted colour palette, and the
elements of water, stone and
evergreen planting.
• A formal lake, with black swans,
contrasts with the informality of
willow, fern and wisteria bordering
the water.

16. Jellicoe identified five archetypes, ‘each carrying an imprint of the experience of an
era’. He described them as Transparencies instead of archetypes:
• Rock and Water: ‘so remote as to be scarcely perceptible’
• Forester: ‘most small domestic gardens are inspired by the instincts of
the Forester’
• Hunter: ‘from this idealistic transparency comes much of the English eighteenth
century romantic landscape’
• Settler: ‘the era began through the discovery of geometry as a means of defining
territory in an agricultural rather than a nomad economy... mathematics were divine’
• Voyager: ‘the unfinished transparency of our own era, which might be called
the Voyager in contrast to the Settler’.
JELLICOE’S FIVE TRANSPARENCIES

17. • The Five Transparencies derive from man’s collective experience of
making, using and experiencing landscape. They coexist in the
collective unconscious. Any or all of them can influence a landscape
design.
• Emphasizing one or other transparency may generate a specific style of
landscape design, but the sequence of transparencies does not equate
with the sequence of design styles. It was under the influence of the fifth
transparency that ‘for the first time in western history landscape
architecture was to become an art in its own right’.
• This was from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day.
JELLICOE’S FIVE TRANSPARENCIES

18. • Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 1925.
• Landscape of Civilization, created for the Moody Historical gardens,
Antique Collectors Club, 1989.
• The Landscape of Man, shaping the environment from prehistory to
present day, Thames & Hudson, 1995.
• The Complete Landscape Designs and Gardens of Geoffrey Jellicoe,
Thames & Hudson, 1994.
• Designing the New Landscape, Thames & Hudson, 1998.
• The Oxford Companion to Gardens, Oxford University Press, 2001.
MAJOR PUBLICATIONS

19. • Water reoccurs in many of Jellicoe’s designs.
• In places it is still and reflective, in others tumbling down steep slopes
adding an extra auditory dimension to the design.
WATER IN JELLICOE’S WORKS
• Indeed, at Horsted Place there is no water. Instead, the lawns flow out
towards the woods like lakes and planters seem to float on their surface.
• In his later schemes, it is also possible to interpret his use of water in an
allegorical sense, or as an attempt to engage the subconscious.

20. HORSTED PALACE

21. • At Sutton Place (1980), Jellicoe designed in several areas of still water.
In the Paradise Garden, a large formal pond bars direct entry to the
garden, its tranquil surface hardly distributed by spouting gargoyles.
SUTTON PLACE
• Further, on the swimming
pool, known as the Miro
Mirror, features an elegant
trick.

22. • Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe holds a unique position in modern British landscape
design.
• Coming into practice in the period after “The Great War” when the old
nostrums were naturally reviled, he combined an appreciation of the
classical with a love of modern. Through a long career, he skillfully
combined the two and interwove them with a regard for human scale and
feelings.
• In his work he can be said to have invented the idea of the professional
landscape designer, taking the treatment of a building’s exterio beyond
being just an adjunct to the structural design. His work confirmed the
artistry in landscape and garden design.
CONCLUSION

23. • https://www.gardenvisit.com/biography/sir_geoffrey_jellicoe
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Jellicoe
• https://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/garden_landscape_design_articles/designers/
geoffrey_alan_jellicoe_subconscious
• https://www.greatbritishgardens.co.uk/garden-designers/30-sir-geoffrey-jellicoe-1900-
1996.html
• http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/obituary-sir-geoffrey-jellicoe-5607830.html
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Geoffrey-Alan-Jellicoe
• http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/22/world/sir-geoffrey-jellicoe-leader-in-landscape-
design-dies-at-95.html
• https://www.landscapeinstitute.org/blog/jellicoe-method-methodology/
• http://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/outdoor-spaces/features/gardens-shute-house/swans-
and-flowers
• http://www.npg.org.uk/
• http://users.eggconnect.net/mandvbrackenbury/Geoffrey%20Jellicoe.html
• http://eng.archinform.net/arch/2815.htm?scrwdt=1024
• www.google.co.in
• www.slideshare.net
REFERENCES