Gertrude Jekyll’s Surrey Gardens

The Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, is proud to announce the online publication of 931 high-resolution images of drawings, maps, plans, correspondence, notes, and ephemera from The Gertrude Jekyll Collection. These images document Gertrude Jekyll's gardens and landscapes in the county of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

The images are published on Calisphere, a gateway to more than one million digitized objects from libraries, archives, museums, and cultural institutions in the state of California.

View the images from the Jekyll Collection here: https://calisphere.org/collections/26864/

This digitization project was made possible by the generous support of the Surrey Gardens Trust, an educational charity dedicated to raising awareness of and protecting Surrey's heritage of historic parks, gardens and designed landscapes. The documents from the Gertrude Jekyll Collection were individually digitized and cataloged in-house at the Environmental Design Archives, one of the foremost collections of Architecture, Landscape architecture, Planning, and Design records in the United States.

Eldon Beck Collection

The EDA is happy to announce that the Eldon Beck Collection is processed and accessible to researchers!

Beck graduated from the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture in 1953. Beck began his professional career with Eckbo, Royston, and Williams in 1956 and was offered the position of Associate with the new firm of Royston, Hanamoto, and Mayes in 1958 when the Eckbo firm took a new direction. In 1960, he became a partner in the firm eventually known as Royston, Hanamoto, Beck, and Abey (RHBA).

In September 1978, Beck was offered an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley so he took a one year leave of absence from RHBA. Although he had no intention of pursuing professional work, at the same date in September 1978, he was asked to prepare the masterplan for a new village at Whistler, British Columbia. In September 1979, Beck left RHBA and established the firm of Eldon Beck, Landscape Architects with three employees, Steve Perkins, Renee Bradshaw, and Hope Rehlander, all graduates of the UC Berkeley Landscape Program. In 1985 additional major projects were offered and the corporation of Eldon Beck Associates was formed. Beck continued to teach at Berkeley until 1987.

The Eldon Beck Collection spans the years 1968-2014 (bulk 1990-2006), and includes files created by Beck while working for RHBA and for his own practice. The collection is organized into three series: Professional Papers, Office Records, and Project Records. The collection documents his career including his work at RHBA, his own landscape architectural practice, and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. His career focused on designing landscapes for commercial and recreational spaces, of which many are well documented in this collection, including the Olympic Athletes Village in Whistler (2006-2010), Whistler Village and Town Center (1978-2010), Mont Tremblant Village (1991-2000), Snowmass Village (2001-2004), and Remarkables Park (1996-2005).

In the December 2018, I was fortunate to spend some time in Whistler, BC, Canada and see firsthand the ingenuity and design that Beck put into Whistler Village, the Olympic Legacy Village, and Plaza. Experiencing firsthand the environment that Beck created while simultaneously processing his collection was both educational and magical. Below are photographs taken during my visit.