Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors at the Gardening Museum

This summer the Garden Museum will present the first exhibition to explore the gardens of the Bloomsbury group.

Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors will centre on four extraordinary women and the green spaces they surrounded themselves with: writer Virginia Woolf and her garden at Monk’s House; her sister artist Vanessa Bell, whose garden and studio was at nearby Charleston; arts patron and photographer Lady Ottoline Morrell, who presided over Garsington Manor; and garden designer and writer Vita Sackville-West and the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle. Photographs, paintings, textiles, garden tools, manuscripts, and correspondence – many of which have never been on public view – will tell the interweaving stories of these women, their lives, their friends and their gardens.

Woolf, Bell, Morrell and Sackville-West were interlinked through ties of friendship, family, love, and creative life, all within the radical circle of the Bloomsbury group. Known for their liberal ideas about politics, sex and relationships, and for their rebellion against the conventions of formal society, the Bloomsbury group are often more associated with interior and metropolitan life. Gardening Bohemia will explore how each of their gardens has an important story to tell, and how they became places of sanctuary and experiment through times of personal and national crises, where ideas about creativity and domesticity, nature and relationships could be uprooted and redefined. In looking to their gardens, much can be learned about their social, creative, political and horticultural lives.

The exhibition will lead visitors through sections or ‘outdoor rooms’, each pivoting around themes of life, love and war. The exhibition will be designed by an all-female team from Motive Productions, a multi-disciplinary studio based in South London.

Ottoline Morrell described Garsington Manor as a kind of ‘theatre’ for social gatherings, and during the First World War she offered her home as a farm that would provide employment for the conscientious objectors and pacifists in her circle. Many of the artists and writers who visited created poems, paintings and stories inspired by the house and formal Italianate gardens, including Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, and John Nash whose work will be featured in the exhibition. At the heart of the garden was the ilex-fringed pond where Morrell and her friends bathed by moonlight. The pond is depicted in paintings including Pond at Garsington (1919), by The Hon. Dorothy Brett and The Pond at Garsington (1916), by Mark Gertler, and is seen as the backdrop for social activity in many of Morrell’s photographs.

Morrell’s unique flair for style and the influence of the garden on her fashion will be demonstrated by floral textiles and clothes including an Indian floral print jacket and a Fortuny dress with briar rose decoration. Alongside these, Ottoline’s camera will be displayed among photographs from her personal albums depicting Bloomsbury friends socialising in the garden and conscientious objectors working in the fields in wartime. The theatrical and bohemian quality of life at Garsington will also be illustrated through photographs such as one depicting artist Dora Carrington, naked, climbing a sculpture.

In contrast to this sociable sanctuary, from 1919, Virginia Woolf found solace in her garden at Monk’s House, a 16th-century cottage in Rodmell, Sussex with three quarters of an acre. Although her husband, writer Leonard Woolf, was the more green-fingered of the pair, Woolf’s garden became a creative inspiration as well as a therapeutic site during intense periods of psychological disturbance and convalescence. Woolf wrote most of her best known novels in a hut next to the apple orchard; the manuscript of her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own (loaned from Fitzwilliam Museum) will be among the literary materials displayed in the exhibition. Gardening Bohemia will invite visitors to reconsider Woolf’s “room of one’s own” as an outdoor room: a defined, designed space in nature, contained but freeing to the imagination.

Woolf often visited Charleston, the nearby farmhouse and studio shared by her sister Vanessa Bell and her partner, fellow Bloomsbury group artist Duncan Grant. The garden at Charleston, designed in 1918 by the artist Roger Fry, was filled with flowers which Bell and Grant loved to paint. Their bright, colourful canvases depicting the garden in full bloom will be highlights of the exhibition, including Grant’s Garden Path in Spring (1944) on loan from Tate, and Bell’s View Into a Garden (1926). The house was a gathering place for friends of the Bloomsbury group, a hub of experimental thinking, art, gardening and writing.

In the early 1930s, Woolf became a regular visitor to the colour-themed garden ‘rooms’ at Sissinghurst Castle cultivated by Vita Sackville-West, who had become her lover in the previous decade. Influenced by travels across Persia and making her first large scale garden at Long Barn in Kent, Sissinghurst’s gardens became Sackville-West’s sanctuary and the focus for collaboration with her husband, the diplomat and writer Harold Nicholson. In his words, the gardens were ‘an escape from the world’, and they provided the stimulus for much of Sackville-West’s poetry and her garden journalism. Her writing traces the changes wrought on the landscape during the Second World War as the Women’s Land Army worked the fields. Sissinghurst will be brought to life in the exhibition with Persian miniatures from Sackville-West’s collection, shown alongside her gardening tools and photographs.

The exhibition is guest curated by Dr Claudia Tobin.