'The exhibition came out of thinking about Virginia Woolf's idea that women need to find a creative space in order to pursue their creative life,' says Claudia Tobin, the curator of Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors at the Garden Museum in London. 'And then during lockdown it actually became more poignant as everyone spent so much time in their gardens, at a time of world crisis.'
Tobin's contention is that these gardens were much more than places to instal herbaceous borders or plant fruit trees. These spaces, she says, were integral to the four protagonists' intellectual and artistic outlet. 'We're tracing the relationship between the four women through their gardens and through their interest in plants and plant motifs-not just the gardens and the planting and the design, but also the gardens as a space for experimentation and creativity in different forms.'
The range of the exhibition only reinforces the importance of horticulture to the Bloomsbury circle. It will include flower paintings and garden views by everyone from Bell and Duncan Grant, to Roger Fry, Dorothy Brett and Mark Gertler, as well as the Bloomsbury Group's distinctive painted-over objets d'art, such as a set of flower-painted boots, a china lamp stand and florally decorated boxes.
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