By the window... Virginia Woolf at Monk's House.

From her bedroom window at Monk's House, Virginia Woolf saw a lawn framed by shoots of roses and clematis. With the bedroom at the ground floor, the garden was right out of the door: a green, scented and buzzing world, somehow different from the mosaic of trees, meadows and flowers, paths and distant hills that she enjoyed from the top-floor room.

Added in 1929, the bedroom had no direct access to the house, and, to reach the kitchen, she had to exit into the garden, turn right and descend a few steps. Walking along the brick path in front of the bedroom door, instead, led to her writing room. In the first years, this was a simple tool shed with two large windows near the old fig tree. It was unbearably cold in bad weather and the idea to have a more comfortable room in which to write prompted the building of the extension next to the house with her bedroom and a sitting room above. The increasing revenues of Leonard and Virginia Woolf financed this and several other improvements at Monk's House, the country retreat they had bought at an auction on 1 July 1919 for £ 700.

In her diary, she recorded her first impressions: ‘There is little ceremony or precision at Monk House. It is an unpretending house, long & low, a house with many doors, ... small rooms, ...the kitchen is distinctly bad... nor is there hot water, nor a bath’ but, the ‘size & shape & fertility & wildness of the garden’ conquered both Virginia and Leonard. ‘There seemed a infinity of fruitbearing trees; the plums crow[d]ed so as to weigh the tip of the branch down; unxpected flowers sprouted among cabbages. There were well kept rows of peas, artichokes, potatoes; raspberry bushes had pale little pyramids of fruit; & I could fancy a very pleasant walk in the orchard under the apple trees, with the grey extinghuisher of the church steeple pointing my boundary.'[1]

Despite having little experience in gardening, the couple was soon absorbed by this new world. Leonard became a 'fanatical lover of that garden'[2] as involved in the design of new flowerbeds as in practical tasks. He would happily prune and experiment new plants, create new ponds and paths, add hives and greenhouses for the following fifty years. Virginia helped Leonard, made jams and enjoyed the atmosphere of the garden while busy at writing.

A few months before purchasing Monk's House, she had published Kew Gardens, a short story where a flowerbed, light and voices are the main elements. It was a literary experiment, something that amused her and allowed her to deploy themes and forms that she would later develop in her novels. She was exploring new contents, renegotiating the plot, focusing on visual scenes, capturing single moments and sensations in the incessant flow of life, eliminating useless descriptions and explanations, and reducing and simplifying words. In the opening sentences, flowers are transformed into geometric shapes and colours, “heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves”, “red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour.”[3] The sequence of colours is repeated again and again, until the strong initial visual impact declines as the narrator’s attention gets closer to the flowerbed, recording four couples immersed in their conversations, alternated with the slow progress of a snail firmly determined to cross it. While light reveals the structure of the leaf and the colours of flowers, words reveal human thoughts and memories in a crescendo of fragmented discourses. Reality is perceived as fragmented and complex, different layers and rhythms. She was working to express life behind the flat surface, not to change it.

She would discuss about the rejection of the realism of the nineteenth century novel under the apple trees, but she loved the bright colours and richness of Leonard's traditional flowerbeds, with their zinnias, dahlias, lilies, anemones and roses. No need for modernist experiments in the garden. When she looked out of her bedroom window at Monk's House, all she expected to see was a flourishing, colorful, lovely country garden.

'We can't resist going out to look at pears, ...'[4]

Note:
[1] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. one, p. 286.
[2] Ibid, p. 287.
[3] Kew Gardens, in 'The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf', p. 90.
[4] The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. two, p. 390.

Photos:
Monk's House, Rodmell, August 2014.

Further reading:
Caroline Zoob, Virginia Woolf's Garden. The story of the garden at Monk's House, London, Jacqui Small LLP, 2013.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One 1915-1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, Orlando, Harcourt Inc., 1977.

The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick, Orlando, Harcourt Inc., 1989.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two 1912-1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, New York and London, Harvest/HBJ Book, 1976.

Links:
Monk's House, Rodmell.
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/monks-house