Where world literature flourished

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Yesterday morning the birds were already whistling from the rooftops, today the primroses on the ground proved it, and tomorrow evening at 22:24 the calendar also shows: spring! Anyone who now has a piece of land – even if it’s just a small pot on the balcony – is planting colorful flowers. Even if you have garden beds, you will be happy with tulips and daffodils that gradually shoot up and push out into the light. And the fruit trees are already in bloom.

“But the most important thing is the garden,” wrote the English writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) to her husband Leonard Woolf (1880–1969). “I warn you, he will be our pride.” On 1 July 1919, the couple bought Monk’s house and garden near Brighton, south of London, for £700. In this environment, Virginia Woolf would write her world-famous novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931)—and meet her tragic end in a nearby river.

Since 1980, the Monk’s House and Garden has been part of the National Trust, a British foundation chaired by the Royal President that looks after “places of historical interest or natural beauty”. Author Caroline Zub lived with her husband at the Monk House from 2000 to 2011 and looked after the property, which is open to the public two and three days a week from April to October. Now she has dedicated a charming illustrated book to the “green oasis”.

“We planted and tended the garden like other tenants before us,” writes Zoob. “Like the Woolfs in 1919, we had little gardening experience but a lot of enthusiasm.” This has been carried over into a book which traces the development of the Monk’s House over the last hundred years in six chapters, also contains some biographical notes on the Wolves, but the focus is clearly on the various garden rooms.

There are many gardens: an orchard, a fig tree, a pond and a vegetable garden, an Italian one and the one in front of Virginia’s bedroom. Tooth: “You can imagine how they enjoy the view and agree that this is the most beautiful room in the house and a shame for the bedroom, even though Virginia spent so much time in bed.” In particular, Leonard Woolf designed the garden, which the writer then immortalized in her novels.

“In the garden, where the trees stood next to the flowerbeds, ponds and greenhouses, the birds sang in the hot sun, each to itself,” says Woolf’s novel The Waves. Her husband never intervened to correct her when she wrote about flowers, with fatal consequences: in the novel, for example, the main characters cut blooming roses in December. Asked by an American publisher to correct this, Virginia Woolf said there should be long-stemmed roses in London’s Kew Garden this month.

Source: Blick