The enduring appeal and influence of Bloomsbury interiors has been well charted, along with the group’s originality, and the freedom of expression they espoused. But apart from Sissinghurst, where Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson created one of the greatest gardens of the 20th century, there has been less popular consideration of the space immediately outside their houses - until now, and a new exhibition at the Garden Museum entitled Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors. Using photographs, textiles, manuscripts and correspondence the show explores the gardening connections of four Bloomsbury women: Vanessa Bell at Charleston Farmhouse, Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, and Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington.
Matt Collins, the Head Gardener at the Garden Museum, identifies each of the gardens as ‘artist gardens’; “they have a magic derived from qualities extending beyond aesthetic beauty,” he says. They differ in size and form, but certain themes flow between them, and there is a wealth of ideas that we can adopt and apply to our own patches of land. Happily, if you want to build on the exhibition, three of those gardens are regularly open to the public - Charleston even has a Festival of the Garden in July - while Garsington is occasionally accessible via the National Garden Scheme.
“You can’t recreate Versailles on a quarter acre of Sussex” – but you can achieve great beauty (even in pots)
Perhaps one of the most inspiring aspects that links the four gardens is their unlikely beginnings. “Sissinghurst, Charleston, Monk’s House and Garsington Manor alike are gardens that, to one degree or another, were forged out of former agricultural land, or at least, land previously cultivated for produce,” reveals Matt Collins. Virginia described Charleston to Vanessa, when persuading her to take on the lease, as “all run rather wild,” and Garsington – a Jacobean manor house – was decidedly shabby when Ottoline took ownership. But Sissinghurst was the most impressively derelict: a ruin of an Elizabethan manor house, “there was nothing but a dreadful mess of old chicken houses and . . rubbish dumps. Brambles grew in wild profusion; bindweed wreathed into every support; docks and nettled flourished; half the fruit trees in the orchard were dead… It was the Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance,” wrote Vita in a feature for this magazine in 1950, revealing that it took three years just to clear away the rubbish.
The result, as we know, was a triumph – “Harold Nicolson did the designing, and I did the planting,” Vita continued. “He . . .contrived in the most ingenious way … to produce a design which combines formality with informality. He has managed to get long vistas over and over again, in a relatively small space. This makes the garden look far larger than it in fact is.” There are a series of themed gardens, including a rose garden, cottage garden, herb garden, spring garden, and the famous White Garden.
Dr. Claudia Tobin, curator of Gardening Bohemia, tells us that Virginia sought Vita’s opinion on the garden at Monk’s House – which is when Vita told her that “you can’t recreate Versailles on a quarter acre of Sussex. It just cannot be done.” And yet, inspired by Sissinghurst and the gardens at Garsington, even in that comparatively small space Leonard and Virginia, with their gardener Percy Bartholomew, created an Italian garden, a dew pond, terrace and bowling lawn. At Charleston, Roger Fry, founder of the Omega group and one time lover of Vanessa (and indeed Ottoline) designed the garden as we see it now, “projecting an aesthetic of bold colours and simplified abstract designs,” describes Claudia – and those who have visited will know that there is privacy in the walled garden, afforded by planting which shields the lawns and the small pond, and that beyond the walls there is a vegetable plot, and a larger pond.
Put it all together, and every one of the four gardens is a masterclass in maximising space while not compromising on beauty. Those who are further limited in area can take inspiration from Matt’s approach to the planters at the entrance to The Garden Museum, where the spirit of those gardens is being reflected in a trio of raised planters, each a meter wide and one and half meters long.
Incorporating the influence of travel
Ottoline’s redesigns for Garsington were inspired by the Villa Capponi, just outside Florence. She formed an Italianate garden of 24 parterres with box hedging and Irish yews enclosing a large ornamental pool. (Apparently, locals would climb the trees to be able to look over the walls and spy on Aldous Huxley, Roger Fry, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, et al skinny dipping in that pool – an activity that might have been essential because, as one guest noted, Ottoline spent more money on Italian statues for the garden than she did on bathrooms for the house; beauty always came before practicality.)
At Sissinghurst, Vita and Harold created a Mediterranean garden, inspired by a 1935 visit to Delos, a small rocky island in the Aegean, considered sacred in ancient Greek culture as the place where Apollo and Artemis were born. Their version featured terraced beds, broken columns and false ruins fashioned from the existing remains of the medieval and Elizabethan buildings, and Grecian altars that Harold’s great grandfather had collected. However – and there is a lesson here – this corner of Sissinghurst wasn’t an immediate success. Partly that was because the head gardener and many of his team were called up to serve in the Second World War, but its initial failure also owed to its location: a north-facing slope with poorly draining clay-soil, it could not have been more different from the setting they were trying to mimic. In 1953, Vita wrote that it “has not been a success so far, but perhaps some day it will come right.” And it has - thanks to Dan Pearson, who adjusted the terraces to slope south and drained the soil.
Linking inside and outside, through rooms, textiles, colour and art
Sissinghurst’s series of themed gardens, or ‘garden rooms’, was not a new idea; the layout was inspired by the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens. But certainly treating a garden in such a way is effective at joining the inside and outside. Furthering the concept was mirroring of colour and pattern; Ottoline collected textiles from Europe, China, Persia and India – and aspects of those, including the colour, informed both how she dressed, and how she planted her garden (she also, incidentally, put in night-scented stock beneath the back windows – which is a lovely and easily replicable idea.) In her diaries, Virginia Woolf described the planting at Monk’s House as “a perfect variegated chintz: asters, plumasters, zinnias, gaums, nasturtiums & so on.” And Vita described the Thyme Lawn at Sissinghurst, when flowering in purple and red, as resembling a Persian rug.
Art was something else that existed both inside, and outside – of varying ages and values. At Charleston there are mosaic pavements and tile-edged pools as well as classical statuary, and while Ottoline installed genuine Italian sculptures at Garsington, at Monk’s House Virginia and Leonard opted for reconstituted stone shepherdesses acquired from the local grocery shop.
The garden as ‘A Room of One’s Own’, and source of creative inspiration
Dr. Claudia Tobin points out that each of the women explored in this exhibition “fashioned a creative environment” within their garden (today, we might identify them as ideal home offices). At Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf built a writing room in the garden, while her bedroom (which was initially to be her writing room) also opened into the garden; it was in this house that she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Between the Acts. At Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West had her writing tower where she could look out over the whole garden – and from where she wrote twenty books. At Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s studio had a door to the garden – but Vanessa also took her painting outside, blurring the boundaries of the studio; garden flowers were regular subjects of still-life paintings for both Vanessa and Duncan Grant and their sketchbooks are full of gardening tasks, such as a man with a wheelbarrow. As for Garsington, under Ottoline Morrell it became renowned as a literary salon, and many of those gathered – including Katharine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley and DH Lawrence – used the garden in their writings. Ottoline herself was a keen embroiderer, often of bouquets of flowers.
“Their gardens fired their imaginations,” describes Claudia. For beauty begets beauty, and “until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself,” wrote Virginia. Should you wish to find a means of capturing the charm of your own garden, know that one of the events at the Charleston Festival of the Garden is botanical painting with Lauren Lusk, while the Kew Book of Embroidered Flowers is a practical guide to replicating beauty with a needle.
The garden as refuge, and symbol of hope
In the June issue of House & Garden, on newsstands now, psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith has written an essay on the healing power of gardening, and it’s something that Olivia Laing touches on too, in her new book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. So it was for each of these women, who lived through wars, and unthinkable loss, and periods of severe mental anguish. And while none of those gardens were soundproofed against the echoes of guns across the Channel, or could inure against the death of a child, they played a therapeutic role, and, arguably, aided in the creative transformation of such experiences. Additionally, gardens, with their cycles of rebirth, are representative of hope for a future that outlives us, as each of these gardens has outlived their makers.
