Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

We regret to announce that Miss Gertrude Jekle died at her home at Godalming on Thursday evening

at the age of 89. She had been failing for some weeks

and had felt the recent death of her brother Sir Herbert Jekle. In the House of Nature,

there are many mansions.

Inhabited by widely divergent spirits, Darwin and Wallace took continents and oceans as their

laboratories wherein to study strange and living creations.

Wordsworth and Tennyson, lifting their eyes to the hills and the sky,

discourse of religion and philosophy.

Gertrude Jekyll, to whom we now bid a grateful, hail and farewell, sought ever

for practical knowledge allied to beauty.

And in that quest, whereby she may truly be said to have transfigured the gardens of England,

she never grew old at heart or wearied in mind, was never discouraged by difficulty or defeated by failure, neither did she cease to share widely the fruits of her long and loving

apprenticeship to nature.

So said the time's obituary upon the death of our great life today.

She was an apparently difficult child whose father called her a queer fish.

She said to have hated noise so much that she once threw a pair of boots out of the window at a nightingale

that was disturbing her peace in the family home.

Well that queer fish was the garden designer Gertrude Jekle, and she's the choice of the man who was behind the Mulberry fashion brand, Roger Saul.

Roger, is there a clue here in the title of your label, the fact that you named it after a tree, Mulberry, is that indicative

of an early love of nature of the outdoors? Is that why you've chosen Gertrude Jekle?

I think two answers to that. one certainly I didn't know Gertrude

...