‘Gardening Bohemia’: A Fascinating New Exhibit on the Bloomsbury Women at the Garden Museum

“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