In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature

3. Limits of the Gardenas Cultured Space

Though Virginia Woolf had only a modest record as a gardener, from her earliest years she recorded vivid impressions of gardens that held lasting significance. She was highly accurate in natural detail and imaginative with similes, metaphors, and modernist representation that included the influenceofPost-Impressionism.Complex,interactivegardenscenespermeate her novels and stories, many bearing hidden meanings. For Victorians, Limits of the Garden as Cultured Space The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. •Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past” The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable door. Look! Do not move. Grasp the ferns tight on the top of the wall. •Woolf, The Waves 3 71 72 In the Hollow of the Wave flowers might function as a code for things that could not properly be said or must be kept secret. Kate Greenaway’s 1884 book The Language of Flowers decodes various flowers, trees, and vegetables, whereby (for example) ivy connotes fidelity and marriage, the oak leaf, bravery, and the white lily, purity and sweetness.1 In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom takes the pseudonym “Henry Flower” to conduct a secret correspondence with Martha Clifford, and he notes that women like the language of flowers because “no-one can hear” (5.261). In Woolf’s writing of the garden, we may find such important but censored subjects as sexual awakening, same-sex attraction, bodily and mental trauma, and resistance to patriarchal patrolling of boundaries, as well as delight in observation and pursuit of freedom. In early writing about gardens, Woolf was troubled about limitations she perceived in accounts by natural history enthusiasts—a group already encountered in chapter 2. As she began reconceiving them, gardens offered Woolf the fusion of natureculture theorized by Donna Haraway, for they housed not just flowers, but human products, designs, interactions, and conversations, and invited merger. Like the “common sitting room” so carefully observed by Jane Austen (AROO 66), gardens provided a place to study human behavior. As appropriate to feminist concern for women’s lived experience, a tour through Woolf’s actual and imagined gardens allows us to chart her feminist refiguring of garden space.2 Childhood’s Garden The earliest garden of Woolf’s recollection was at St. Ives—largely the creation of her mother, Julia Stephen. The climate of Cornwall was mild enough for Mediterranean flora such as escallonia and yuccas to survive. Talland House had extensive greenhouses that ran between the front garden and the orchard, sheltering grapes and delicate flowers. A fine record of the layout comes from Leslie Stephen in his Mausoleum Book. He recalls its compartmentalizedspacesandJulia ’spresenceinwhatamountstoadomesticsetting: “A garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia, a grape-house, and kitchen-garden and a socalled ‘orchard’ beyond. . . . I can see my Julia strolling among her beloved flowers: sitting in the ‘loo corner,’ a sheltered seat behind the grape-house, or the so-called ‘coffee garden,’ where on hot days she would be shaded by the Limits of the Garden as Cultured Space 73 great escallonia hedge” (62; figure 11). Stephen made a strong, feminine connection between flowers and both of his wives, particularly in memorializing them. He chose cyclamen (a symbol of resignation or farewell)3 to decorate his first wife Minny’s gravestone. Woolf’s description of the layout of the garden in “A Sketch of the Past” is less organized than her father’s, but it has the dynamism and sensual excitement of a young participant in the scene. Written toward the end of her life, this work is much more confident than her earliest diary accounts of gardens, to which we turn shortly. “Running down the hill, little lawns, surrounded by thick escallonia bushes, whose leaves one picked and pressed and smelt: it had so many corners and lawns that each was named: the coffee garden; the fountain; the cricket ground; the love corner...