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Virginia Woolf's Garden: The Story of the Garden at Monk's House. Caroline Zoob with photography by Caroline Arber, Foreword by Cecil Woolf (London: Jacqui Small LLP, 2013) 192 pp.
In June 1936 Virginia Woolf was at Monk's House, in the throes of collecting the proofs of The Years. During these difficult days she found serenity in her garden and was able to write to Ottoline Morrell: "Here it rains, but its [sic] lovely in the garden; Leonard's flowers suddenly light up in the evening" (L6 45). This statement sums up for me Woolf's relationship with her garden: it was for enjoying, it had invaluable, inspiring aesthetic qualities, but like those flowers she mentioned, it belonged to Leonard Woolf and it was he who designed and worked in it. Nor, despite this book's title, is Caroline Zoob under any illusion as to the garden's "authorship." She duly credits Leonard for his creative garden-making, and his assistant Percy Bartholomew, his local Rodmell gardener. Zoob notes how Virginia Woolf, with Vita Sackville-West ("one of the most exciting gardeners of the century") on hand for gardening advice, "hardly exchanged a word on the subject in nearly twenty years" of lengthy correspondence ([92]).
Bloomsbury's gardens have been picked and harvested for the subjects of books one by one starting with Anne Scott-James's Sissinghurst: The Making of a Garden (1975) followed by two more on Sissinghurst and Vita SackvilleWest by Jane Brown (1985 and 1990). Then it was Charleston's season, first with Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden by Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicholson (1997), and more recently by Sue Snell in her The Garden at Charleston (2010). Now, with the book under review, Monk's House garden takes its turn in the spotlight. It has been left to last probably because, unlike Sissinghurst, its modest, domestic scale is not aristocratic; similarly Monk's House lags behind Charleston in visitor numbers, having a lower public and commercial profile. However, there is another crucial reason: I believe no one, since the Woolfs, has worked in it or is as familiar with its layout and its history, as its tenants of ten years, Caroline...