With two weeks left to see Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, we’re sharing an extract of curator Claudia Tobin’s essay from the exhibition catalogue:
On a visit to Cambridge University Virginia Woolf was reprimanded for daring to walk across the scrupulously mown lawns reserved only for the male fellows of the colleges.
‘I was a woman. This was the turf; […] the gravel is the place for me’, Woolf reported of her audacious ‘trespassing’.[2]
This was one of the sparks that ignited the fire in her polemical essay A Room of One’s Own, first given in 1928 as two lectures on women and fiction to students of the women’s colleges at Cambridge. Her essay goes on to vividly underscore the contrast between the gardens in the men’s and women’s colleges at Cambridge, a contrast that underpins her larger argument about the limits imposed on women’s education and access to knowledge. The men’s colleges with their quadrangles of ‘smooth’ ‘hard’ lawns are funded by an unending ‘flow of silver and gold’ that gives an ease to intellectual endeavour.[3]
When Woolf enters the garden at the women’s college – based on Newnham but reimagined with the botanically-inspired name ‘Fernham’ – she discovers ‘wild and open’ gardens, which invite the wandering imagination. The season seems to transform from autumn to spring: ‘the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air’.[4]
There is an enchanted, sensuous quality to this garden that would have appealed to the writer and garden-maker Vita Sackville-West who accompanied Woolf to the lecture, and who had become her lover in the 1920s. The gates to the garden at Fernham were open and unguarded, but Woolf wanted to make its students aware of the exclusionary nature of women’s education and its repercussions for their creative lives. As she argues repeatedly in the essay, a woman ‘must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’.[5]
Gardening Bohemia invites you to revisit Woolf ’s ‘room of one’s own’ as an outdoor room: a sanctuary in nature, contained but with space to flex the imagination. Each of the extraordinary women explored here fashioned a creative environment or ‘room of one’s own’ which was intimately linked to their lives outdoors. Their gardens fired their imaginations. Woolf made her garden writing room when she and her husband Leonard moved in 1919 to ‘Monk’s House’, a 16th century cottage in Rodmell, Sussex with just under an acre of garden; Vanessa Bell often used her garden as an outdoor studio at Charleston, her farmhouse in Sussex; the terrace and yew fringed pond in Ottoline Morrell’s Oxfordshire garden at Garsington became a stage or ‘theatre’[6]; while Vita Sackville-West made an Elizabethan tower her distinctive writing perch at Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent.
Through times of personal and national crisis during the first half of the twentieth century, their gardens were sites of experimentation in alternative ways of living; refuges where ideas about creativity, domesticity and relationships could be uprooted, re-examined and reimagined.
Monk’s House and Charleston: Solitude and Sociability
At Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf began living and writing at the very threshold of interior and exterior. The garden seemed to flow into the house, with its drawing room painted a distinctive vegetal green (her favourite colour). Her bedroom was accessed directly from the garden, and her writing room was the tool shed. She later migrated to the more private space of a wooden lodge which nestled near the orchard. There her writing was accompanied by the buzzing of bees in summer, the thud of ripe apples falling in autumn, the chiming bells from the neighbouring parish church, and – during the Second World War – the uneasy drone of low flying war planes. It was here that she wrote many of her most experimental novels, working the immediate sensory worlds of the garden into her fiction and non-fiction and often blending them with the gardens of childhood memory.
In the Orchard, published in 1923, is one of Woolf ’s short stories which feels most closely associated with the atmosphere of her garden at Rodmell. The orchard was a favourite place for talking and walking among the ‘pale green globes’ and of course ‘appling’ (a task she and Leonard shared).[7] A short extract from the opening of the story gives a flavour of Woolf ’s impressionistic prose in a vision of high summer, drenched in light and colour:
‘Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass […]. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.'[8]
This luminous image of Miranda asleep in the orchard conjures a similar mood to a painting by Vanessa Bell of her sister in a sun-hat ensconced in a deck chair in a garden. In this elusive elliptical portrait painted c.1912, Woolf ’s facial features are blurred as if seen in full sun or evading the viewer’s gaze. Bell’s paintings of friends and family outdoors are compelling: in her equally sundrenched painting A Girl Reading (c.1932), the lowered head of her subject evokes complete absorption in her imaginative life, whether she is reading or in fact drawing, as the large board on her knees suggests.
Monk’s House was within easy cycling distance of Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse which Bell made her home and studio with her lover, the painter Duncan Grant from 1916. As a conscientious objector during the First World War, the move to Charleston also enabled Grant to do farming as war work. It was Woolf who had urged her sister to take the house, writing with particular emphasis on the charm of the garden, with its pond, fruit trees, and vegetable patch ‘all rather run wild’.[9]
The Bloomsbury art critic Roger Fry drew up plans for the garden, projecting an aesthetic of bold colours and simplified abstract designs which also defined the house with its vibrant decorative schemes animating the walls and furnishings. Fresh flowers from the garden became subjects for the numerous still lifes that Grant and Bell painted throughout their lives. Many of their paintings give clues to their taste in planting (red-hot pokers were a shared feature of the garden at Charleston and Monk’s House). Bell and Grant’s sketchbooks are also populated by vibrant studies of flowers and of gardening tasks, as in Bell’s painting on lined paper of a man with a wheelbarrow tending a flowerbed, which retains the freshness of working rapidly outdoors.
Even when working inside, Bell often positioned herself at open doors and windows arranging compositions of flower pieces in dialogue with the garden outside, and she later retreated to an attic studio with a bird’s eye view over the walled garden.
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