Kathleen Letitia Lloyd Jones, often known simply as Kitty, was a garden designer, active in the 20th century.
Jones was born at Rotherslade House at Oystermouth on the Gower peninsula in Glamorgan, south Wales, on 4 June 1898, the 9th of 10 children of physician and surgeon, Arthur Lloyd Jones (born 1853, died 1932), and his wife, Margaret Spears (born 1857, died 1931).
In 1910 Jones left south Wales and was educated at the Channing School for Girls in Highgate, Middlesex, a school founded by her maternal grandfather, the Reverend Robert Spears.
From 1917 to 1919 she studied for her diploma at the Royal Botanic Society's practical gardening school at Regent's Park, London. Later she enrolled at Reading University for a degree in agriculture and horticulture and then for a national diploma of horticulture. She graduated in 1925.
Jones began her career as a private gardening tutor. From 1925 to 1931 she lived in a cottage in the grounds of Dane End House, at Ware in Hertfordshire, the home of her employer Mrs Balfour's sister, Lady Gladstone, a gardener and nurserywoman. Here her first design commission was for a large curvilinear border.
By the early-1930s she had moved to, and established a garden advisory consultancy at, White Cottage, Binfield, in Berkshire and was working in both the UK (mostly in England in the counties of Berkshire, Hertfordshire, and Oxfordshire and in Scotland on the island of Gigha in Argyll) and in northern France (Courances in 1930, Pontrancart in 1933). According to Rachel Berger, she became an expert on rhododendrons, shrubs, and roses.
Jones died, unmarried, of heart failure on 9 July 1978 at a nursing home near Ascot, Berkshire. She was cremated on 13 July at Easthampstead Park, Berkshire.
Bibliography
Berger, Rachel, ‘Jones, Kathleen Letitia Lloyd (1898–1978)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67031> [accessed 18 December 2007]-'Kitty Lloyd Jones: Lady Gardener and Nurserywoman', Garden History, 25:1 (Summer, 1997), pp. 107-116.