Talk of the Town: A Fascinating New Exhibit on the Women of Bloomsbury and Their Country Gardens

“It is lucky perhaps that Bloomsbury has a pleasant reverberating sound, suggesting old-fashioned gardens and out-of-the-way walks and squares; otherwise how could one bear it?” It is apparent throughout the rest of this reminiscence by British artist Vanessa Bell that the fertile post-Victorian cultural movement known as Bloomsbury, based on the London neighborhood that was the intellectual hub of the era, drew unsolicited attention from its earliest days. When the First World War broke out, gossipmongers became even more fixated with the young iconoclasts when they declared themselves to be conscientious objectors. Leaving behind the gardens, walks, and drawing rooms of this low-key part of central London, the Bloomsbury Group relocated to the country, helping the war effort by working on farms. This period is the focus of the Garden Museum’s small and remarkably well-packaged show Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors (until September 29).

Paintings, photographs, and letters relating to the gardens of three Bloomsbury women, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell—as well as Vita Sackville-West, who was part of Bloomsbury’s constellation—show us that regarding this much-discussed group, there is always something left to say.

Vanessa Bell at Charleston Farmhouse

The bohemian atmosphere of Charleston, when occupied by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant—and a variety of intellectuals who did a lot of room swapping —has been well documented. The house was and is very much connected with a farm, located at the end of a bumpy track. The garden was a form of self-expression, just like the house, and plants that were grown for color and shape made their way into some of the paintings that are gathered in this show (and are mainly missing from Charleston Farmhouse). The garden was designed by artist and critic Roger Fry, whose garden portraits of Vanessa, for whom he had a briefly reciprocated passion, are included here.

Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House

“She often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” The quote on the endpapers at the back of the well-illustrated catalog has a particular resonance with ideas around mental health and gardening today. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it is revealing of Woolf’s own relationship with gardens: she left the hard graft to Leonard but her diaries reveal that she enjoyed getting her hands into the soil. Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, and Between the Acts (unfinished at time of death) were written in a “lodge” by the orchard.

The Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, had a thing about red hot pokers. Making an appearance in To the Lighthouse, they frame Mr and Mrs Ramsay as they walk in their summer garden, and the show has an endearing photograph of Woolf standing between some of these South African giants. It is very possible that Vita Sackville West included them in her cottage garden of sunset colors at Sissinghurst as a homage to Woolf. Red hot pokers were more suburban than bohemian at mid-century, and Vita’s husband Sir Harold Nicolson couldn’t abide them.

Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst

Harold Nicolson described the garden he made with his wife Vita Sackville-West as “a series of escapes from the world,” a good way of referring to the much overused term “garden rooms.” Sissinghurst was itself a series of building remnants, fashioned out of the ruins of a castle that once hosted Elizabeth I. The pair were hands-on gardeners, and Vita wrote about her experiences in a weekly column for the Observer newspaper. In 1950 she described, somewhat tentatively, her idea for a “white, grey and green garden” which would become one of the most famous gardens in the world, the White Garden. “This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it… I don’t want to boast in advance about my grey, green and white garden. It may be a terrible failure.”

Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor

The least famous of these Bloomsbury women, Lady Ottoline Morrell, went to great lengths to create a scene at her country house Garsington Manor, where peacocks roosted in trees and guests swam naked in a great rectangular pond—made by monks for keeping fish. It lives on in the paintings of modernists showing a strong Post-impressionist influence (Bloomsbury was very keen on Cézanne). Mark Gertler, whose background was not privileged, was nurtured and given safe haven by Ottoline, and his paintings of Garsington are a stand out.

Ottoline’s great wish was for Garsington to be a living artwork, and she dressed accordingly, lending Bloomsbury a glamour that it generally lacked. Maybe she tried too hard, and certainly spent too much (the estate was sold with reluctance in 1928), and her friends were not above mocking her, all the while accepting her hospitality. DH Lawrence wrote about the enchantment of Garsington, while satirizing Ottoline in Women in Love and using her affair with a gardener (whose nickname was Tiger) as inspiration for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A dedicated memoirist and photographer, Ottoline had a self-awareness that led her to poignantly acknowledge in her memoirs: “The company that entered each weekend were a queer, strange, rather ragged company. How much they felt and saw of the beauty of the setting I never knew.”

Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors is at the Garden Museum in London, until September 29.

See also:

• Garden Visit: An Artist’s Palette at Charleston Farmhouse
• Is Gardening Art? Fergus Garrett Makes a Compelling Case
• Bohemian Bolthole: Kelmscott Manor, Former Home of William Morris