Heaven is a place on earth

For the women of the Bloomsbury group, their country gardens were places of refuge, reflection and inspiration, as well as a means of keeping loved ones close by, discovers Deborah Nicholls-Lee

- Deborah Nicholls-Lee

IN the early 1900s, the Bloomsbury district of west London was a hub for a bohemian circle of writers, artists and philosophers who would enrich our cultural and intellectual heritage. Although they became known as the Bloomsbury Group, much of their creative impulse came from the time they spent far from London, in the verdant gardens of their country homes. A new exhibition opening this month at London's Garden Museum puts a spotlight on four of these gardens and their female owners, displaying paintings, photographs, textiles, correspondence and even garden tools to tell their interwoven stories.

'A dream of what England had once been'

When writer and garden designer Vita Sackville-West moved to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the moated Elizabethan manor was in ruins and its gardens, which stretched out over woods, streams and farmland, were, she wrote, 'crying out for rescue'. A Gallica rose was one of the few specimens to survive the dilapidation and became a motif for a lost Eden that she hoped to re-create by trailing her beloved old roses around apple trees and designing, in partnership with her husband, the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, an abundant rose garden that typified her 'cram, cram, cram' landscaping strategy. Her vision for Sissinghurst, wrote her grandson Adam Nicolson in 2018, was 'deeply nostalgic and retrospective, a dream of what England had once been'.

Sissinghurst's disjointed buildings forced an intimacy with the garden and SackvilleWest traversed it at all hours and in all weathers as she moved between meals, work and bed the celebrated White Garden, with its piles of white pompom dahlias, tulips, gladioli and irises, doubtless offering welcome luminosity at night. With her husband's precise planning and her know-how, the grounds were transformed into one of England's most admired gardens, which she enjoyed surveying from her study in the tower.