Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors

Centering on Vita Sackville West, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Lady Ottoline Morrell, this exhibition tells the story of the women of the Bloomsbury group, and friends through their gardens. 

The Bloomsbury group included iconic writers such as Virginia Woolf and E.M Forster, post-impressionist painters Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, and influential critics, essayists and philosophers including John Maynard Keynes. The group who lived, worked and studied together in and around the Bloomsbury neighbourhood of London, had an outsized impact on the literature, philosophy and politics in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century,

In this exhibition, guest curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, photographs, paintings, textiles, books, and correspondence (many of which have never been on public view before) explore the interweaving lives and shared garden sanctuaries of four leading women of the group and the green spaces they surrounded themselves with.

For each of the extraordinary women explored in this exhibition, their gardens became places of sanctuary and experiment through times of personal and national crises, where ideas about creativity and domesticity, nature and relationships could be uprooted and redefined.

The exhibition centres on Virginia Woolf and her garden at Monk's House; her sister the artist Vanessa Bell, whose garden and studio was at nearby Charleston; arts patron and photographer Lady Ottoline Morrell, who presided over Garsington Manor; garden designer and writer Vita Sackville-West and the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle.