Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors

The Garden Museum will present the first exhibition exploring the gardens of the Bloomsbury group.

Vanessa Bell painting
credit: The Garden Museum

The exhibition, curated by Dr Claudia Tobin is entitled Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors will centre on four extraordinary women and the green spaces they surrounded themselves with:

  • Writer Virginia Woolf and her garden at Monk’s House
  • Vanessa Bell and her Charleston garden
  • 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

For each of the women explored in the 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. Photographs, paintings, textiles, garden tools, manuscripts, and correspondence – many of which have never been on public view – will tell the interweaving stories of these women, their creative lives, their friends and their gardens.

The exhibition takes place at the Garden Museum from the 15th of May and will run until the 29th of Sep 2024.