At this time of the year I want to spend every waking minute in the garden. Unfortunately many of those waking minutes must be spent doing the necessary chores of life, like making money. To add insult to that injury, the weather on the majority of recent days has been so wet that Wellington boots and a rowboat might be more useful in the garden than a spade and trowel. At times like this, Virginia Woolf’s Garden is a godsend.
In 2000, author, artisan and solicitor Caroline Zoob and her husband, Jonathan, became tenants at Monk’s House, a historic property owned by England’s National Trust. The National Trust is best known for its stewardship of great houses, but also numbers many more modest places among its holdings. Monk’s House, in the southern English county of Sussex, is one of them. It is actually an eighteenth century cottage, occupied at various times since its construction by farmers and millers. Its brush with fame began on the day in 1919 when it was purchased by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, members of the fabled literary and artistic Bloomsbury group, for use as a country retreat. Virginia, who suffered bouts of mental illness throughout her life, committed suicide in 1941, but Leonard lived on at Monk’s House until his death in 1969.
Virginia Woolf’s Garden is really several stories rolled into one. Zoob provides glimpses into the life of the house before and after the Woolf’s arrival, tells the story of the making of the garden and discusses how it has evolved in the thirty-five years of National Trust ownership.
It is clear from the beginning that while Virginia drew endless inspiration and solace from the garden, Leonard was the passionate horticulturist. Starting out as a novice, who started seeds in emptied out wooden soap boxes, he learned to do everything, from figuring out planting plans to digging out beds. He installed and pruned fruit trees, especially his beloved pears and figs, and kept beehives. Water features sprouted on the property like mushrooms after rain. As Virginia said, “Leonard had a passion for ponds.” At least one of those ponds was stocked with goldfish.
The Woolfs were close friends with other celebrated literary gardeners, most notably Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. For a time, Virginia and Vita were also lovers, in one of those relationship permutations characteristic of the Bloomsbury group. Like many of the world’s gardeners, I admire the Nicolson/Sackville-West landscape at Sissinghurst. However, I find that the garden at Monk’s House resonates more with me. Both landscapes were and are full of old-fashioned flowers, including lady’s mantle, foxglove, clematis, hellebore, tulips and roses, but Leonard Woolf’s cottage garden-type plantings were less disciplined, with jumbled mixes of colors in some places. When it comes to record keeping, Woolf was a gardener after my own heart. “Leonard recorded every single plant he bought,” writes Zoob, “but rarely where he planted them.” The author’s descriptions, interspersed with quotes from both Woolfs, are so vivid that you can almost smell the ripe pears.
The plants found their way indoors as well. The interior photos, by Caroline Arber, show sunny windowsills filled with geraniums and other tender plants accenting walls painted in Virginia’s beloved shades of green. The Trust stipulates that the house be filled with the small arrangements of garden flowers favored by Virginia Woolf.
Zoob takes pains to point out that the gardens portrayed in the book are not the same as those Virginia Woolf would have seen in her time, though many paths and features remain. Leonard made numerous changes after his wife’s death, including the addition of a conservatory that Harold Nicolson thought Virginia “would have hated.” The National Trust expects its tenants to keep up the beds, borders, shrubs and trees and to make plantings at Monk’s House “in the spirit of Bloomsbury.” The whole landscape must be presentable enough to withstand the scrutiny of visitors, to whom it is open several times a week. The tenants, who pay for the cost of the plants and maintenance, have the benefit of advice from the Trust’s team of garden advisors.
Virginia Woolf’s Garden is a wonderful wallow in the heart of Bloomsbury, full of art and literature and, most of all, flowers. It makes me want to run out into my own cottage-type garden and start planting. I have a feeling Leonard Woolf would do so too–even in a downpour.