In 1905, the future Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, writers and intellectuals, began to meet weekly at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, London. This was the home of the Stephen siblings, and the group included the painter Vanessa Bell (1879 – 1961) and the writer Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941). They were joined by other important figures of the time, such as the critic Roger Fry (1866 – 1934) and artist Duncan Grant (1885 – 1978). They shared ideas, debated, and discussed their own works. They met for the next 30 years and became known collectively as the Bloomsbury Group. Perhaps more so than their academic achievements, the Bloomsbury Group are known today for their relationships, which at the time were deemed unconventional, but are now celebrated as an important part of British LGBTQIA+ history.
A current exhibition at London’s Garden Museum, named “Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors”, reveals the vital role nature played in the lives and work of this radical creative collective.
Gardens are probably not the first thing that spring to mind when it comes to the women of the Bloomsbury Group, but they played a vital role in the creative lives of the writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s artist sister Vanessa Bell, and the arts patron Lady Ottoline Morrell. Although very different in scale and ambition, their gardens were all places of sanctuary and experimentation, where the women and their circles of friends and family were free to explore their innovative, and often radical, ideas of creativity, life and love. “In very tangible ways, but also in some more ephemeral ways, we can really see how much their gardens shaped their work,” says the writer and academic Claudia Tobin, who curated the current exhibition.
The connection is perhaps most evident at Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse that Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant retreated to in 1916, during World War One. Bustling with family members and friends, it was a sociable and collaborative hive of creativity.
The layout of the garden was designed by the painter and critic Roger Fry, with bold colours and simplified abstract designs. Fry was in part influenced by the Arts and Crafts garden designer Gertrude Jekyll who had worked on his own garden. “He is taking ideas from the Arts and Crafts movement and infusing them with his own modernist vision,” explains Tobin.
The garden was also a safe space for Bell, Grant and their circle to explore their unconventional approach to life and love. The writer David Garnett, a sometime lover of Grant’s (both Bell and Grant were bisexual) was a regular visitor, as was Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, with whom she remained on good terms. During the war both Grant and Garnett were pacifists and were able to do farm work in the local area in lieu of going to the Western Front.
Lady Ottoline Morrell’s garden at Garsington Manor was an equally vibrant and unconventional place, albeit on a somewhat grander scale. The Morrells bought the house in 1914 and Ottoline redesigned the gardens, taking inspiration from those at the Villa Capponi in Italy, which she had visited as a young woman. In her memoirs, she describes the formal flower garden as being “like a coloured, sweet-smelling carpet”, as well as the “monastic fish-ponds, surrounded by Italian statues” and green paths “where peacocks trailed their long tails”.
In this enchanting space, Morrell gathered around her groups of artists, writers and intellectuals who took part in long weekends of dancing, debating, performing and bathing. Katherine Mansfield, DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley were all visitors. She thought of the garden as a kind of living work of art, and, in return, it inspired numerous literary and artistic interpretations, not all of them complimentary.
The liberated nature of the place is more evident in a photograph of the artist Dora Carrington playfully posing next to a statue while entirely nude. Carrington herself commented on the sense of freedom she and Mansfield felt heading out into the moonlit garden, clothed this time, but wearing trousers, a highly unconventional form of attire for women at the time.
Virginia Woolf’s garden at Monk’s House in the village of Rodmell was a much calmer environment. A cherished sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of London, where Woolf delighted in weekends of “no talking” when she could enjoy the garden’s “green tunnels” without interruption. Over the years, the garden developed to include an Italian garden, dew pond, terrace and bowling lawn. And, of course, her very own garden “Room of One’s Own” – a writing hut nestled in the orchard where many of her most important novels and essays were written. Woolf would head there every morning to write, and Tobin believes her environment undoubtedly seeped into her work.
Tobin believes Woolf’s relationship to nature was “therapeutic”. “She wrote about how her mind settled there. It was necessary to her, and particularly necessary to her in periods of mental health crisis, of which, sadly, there were many,” she says. The importance of the garden to Woolf is evidenced by the fact that after she tragically killed herself in 1941, her ashes were buried under an elm tree there, one of a pair referred to as Virginia and Leonard.
The gardens of Woolf’s sometime lover Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst Castle are of course some of the most celebrated in England. Unlike Bell, Woolf and Morrell, Sackville-West was a skilled garden designer in her own right, as well as a novelist and poet. Her combined talents and sensibilities resulted in a truly unique aesthetic. Her “compositions” were a series of themed gardens – the Rose Garden, Cottage Garden, Herb Garden, Spring Garden and, perhaps most famously of all, the White Garden – each envisaged as a botanical “room” providing a stunningly beautiful escape from the world.
Like Woolf, the garden also fed Sackville-West’s literary imagination. “With Vita, her writing and her garden were very symbiotic,” says Tobin. She was a very practical gardener and the garden itself is “very much present throughout her poetry and novels, and it’s often a character in its own right”.
This is particularly evident in her poems Sissinghurst and The Garden. Tobin believes that the latter, published just after World War Two, was “her poem of survival, but lived through the garden. It’s her own garden but it’s also a broader universal meaning of the garden.”
Although Garsington Manor is now privately owned, the houses and gardens at Sissinghurst, Charleston and Monk’s House are all open to the public, allowing us to wander in the footsteps of the Bloomsbury Group women, appreciate their enchanting visions and perhaps gain a little inspiration ourselves.
Lives from a totally different era, even though it was not too long ago.
