Viewing Gardening Bohemia at The Garden Museum

The four women at the centre of the Garden Museum’s current exhibition need little introduction: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Vita Sackville-West were all remarkable contributors to the Bloomsbury Group. Yet while the famous adage of Woolf’s expounded the importance of a room of one’s own – less familiar is the relationship these women had with their carefully cultivated gardens.

Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, takes you from Virgina Woolf’s garden at Monk’s House, to her sister, artist Vanessa Bell’s garden and studio at Charleston, patron and photographer Lady Ottoline Morrell’s outdoor space at Garsington Manor and garden designer and writer Vita Sackville-West’s gardens at Sissinghurst Castle.

Through photographs, paintings, textiles, letters – and even garden tools – this glorious show reveals how important these gardens were to the lives and creativity of each woman, places of personal sanctuary and reprieve, as well as to experiment and nuture – often against a backdrop of politcal and personal turbulence.