Virginia Woolf's .. Monk's House Gardens

Monk’s House Roses and Clematis  © Alice Joyce

When I first read The Waves by Virginia Woolf, the novel’s captivating, modern prose swept me away. At times, I reread it for an infusion of inspiration, being carried away by the rhythmic language. The same force colors my relationship with Woolf’s nonfiction account, A Room of One’s One. Thus, my pilgrimage to Monk’s House became the realization of a long overdue dream to see the 18th century East Sussex country home where Virginia wrote most of her oeuvre, in the house she shared with her husband, Leonard – a property now cared for by The National Trust.

Surprisingly, while the gardens of Virginia’s sister – Vanessa Bell’s Charleston Farmhouse – are widely written about in association with the over-the-top decoration of the house’s every surface and object, I happened upon an unexpectedly heavenly landscape at Monk’s House. A pleasure garden I could not have imagined. I viewed a few rooms in the house, which is occupied by tenant caretakers, and saw Virginia’s bedroom, opening out onto the garden. Here, as at Charleston, members of the Bloomsbury group gathered from 1919, when Monk’s House was purchased, and over the decades that followed.

The garden’s layout is enticingly intimate, informal, lushly planted, and larger than I had expected if I had thought about it at all. Wisteria was abloom outside the door to Virginia’s bedroom, and a beguiling tangle of Clematis montana, brilliant tulips, and Euphorbias managed to brighten the cloudy atmosphere during my visit.

Monk’s House Wisteria  © Alice Joyce

Paved walkways and patios, grassy paths, high boundary hedging, and aged brick walls set off one area from another, drawing you through the landscape from discrete enclosed spaces to the breathtakingly airy, blossoming orchard, where the steeple of St. Peter’s Church emerges as an angular focal point. Sculpture and statuary arise amid the dense greenery, with the strong shapes of large urns placed to punctuate terraces. “The garden falls into four .. sections. The formal walled area behind the house, the orchard to the south, the large open lawn to the east and the kitchen garden beyond.”

Monk’s House Euphorbia Bloom ~ Photo Copyright Alice Joyce

… UNDER CONSTRUCTION …

Water features take in a small square pond set within a swath of lawn; rectangular pool surrounded by paving; and a circular pond in a clearing. A joyful character throughout the gardens surprised me perhaps most of all, thinking about Virginia’s battles with depression.  The garden’s statuary is said to have come from a general store in Barcombe. And although they both gardened, Virginia is quoted as saying, Leonard became “garden proud.”  In the garden you’ll discover the writing lodge where Virginia worked. It now houses an exhibition of photographs of life at Rodmell.