Kew Gardens Virginia Woolf Pdf Download
Marilu Lukaszewski
The woman who became Simon's wife, Eleanor, has a different memory of the gardens, a much earlier one, when she and other little girls sat near the lake with their easels, painting pictures of the water lilies. She had never seen red water lilies before. Someone kissed her on the back of the neck, the experience of which has remained with her ever since: the "mother of all kisses".
The narrative returns to the snail, still trying to reach its goal. After making a decision on its progress, it moves off as a young couple approaches the flowerbed. The young man remarks that on Friday admission to the gardens is sixpence, to which she asks if it is not worth sixpence. He asks what "it" means. She replies "anything." As they stand at the end of the flowerbed, they both press the young woman's parasol into the soil. His hand rests on top of hers. This action expresses their feelings for each other, as do their insignificant words. The narrator states that these are words with "short wings for their heavy body of meaning." Their feelings are evident to the two of them as well as others. The young man speaks to the young woman, Trissie, telling her they should have their tea now. She asks where they have tea in the garden. As she looks over a long grass path, she quickly forgets about the tea and wants to explore the gardens.
One couple after another moves through the gardens with the same aimlessness. Woolf's narrative now dissolves the snatches of conversation into flashes of colour, shape and movement, wordless voices of contentment, passion, and desire. Children's voices echo freshness and surprise. Finally the focus pulls out beyond the gardens, contrasting the murmur of the city with the voices and colour of the gardens.
Two men then appear, the older who appears confused and rambling as he talks of other gardens and other occasions, clearly distressed by tumultuous events in his life. The younger man, William tries to steer him and distract him from his fevered mutterings
The first couple the narrator singles out from the moving crowd is a married couple named Simon and Eleanor, visiting the gardens with their children, Caroline and Hubert. Simon walks in front of his wife, thinking about how he visited the gardens 15 years earlier with Lily, the woman he originally intended to marry. He remembers desperately proposing marriage, unable to take his eyes off the silver buckle on Lily's shoe, which "moved impatiently." He compares his love to a dragonfly, unable to find anywhere to settle. Now, he feels content that Lily rejected him, or else he wouldn't have Eleanor and the children. He asks Eleanor whether she's upset that he's thinking about Lily. Eleanor says she doesn't mind and compares one's past to "ghosts lying under the trees." Eleanor herself recalls being kissed on the back of her neck by "an old gray-haired woman" while Eleanor was painting water lilies as a child. She calls it "the mother of all my kisses all my life." As the family disappears into the trees and shade, the narrator focuses on a snail in the flower bed's soil. The snail "labor[s] over the crumbs of loose earth" as it attempts to crawl straight forward, a method that differs from the "high stepping angular green insect" that trembles and leaps in another direction.
The young man says he's glad it isn't Friday and they don't have to pay the garden's sixpence entry fee. The young woman, Trissie, comments that sixpence isn't very much money and the gardens would be worth it. The couple stands together, pressing Trissie's parasol into the soft earth, the young man's hand lying atop hers. In that moment, the narrator notes that the young couple is "inexperienced" and "awkward." As Trissie talks, the young man feels something loom up "behind her words, and [stand] vast and solid behind them." He feels the shilling coin in his pocket, reassuring himself that it's real, and then pulls Trissie away to buy some tea. Trissie allows herself to be "drawn on down the grass path, trailing her parasol" behind her. As she walks, she remembers "orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird," but the young man pulls her on.
From the story's opening lines, the inspiration of impressionist painting can be seen in Virginia Woolf's intricate details of the gardens. The narrator describes the flower bed from a distance as if observing it in a painting: "There rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves." Then, as if walking closer to inspect the painting, the perspective zooms in to describe the petals stirring in the summer breeze: "When they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other." Then the narration moves even closer still to describe the colors in a single water droplet clinging to a single petal, which "expanded with such intensity ... one expected them to burst and disappear." This zooming effect happens in each scene involving the four couples walking past the flower bed. The reader sees each pair from a distance and then zooms closer and closer to their inner thoughts and intimacies. The reader learns of the secret longings of the married couple, the mental distress of the old man and his companion, the contemplations of the ponderous woman, and the anxieties of the young couple. At a distance, each visitor to the garden appears nondescript, but through the narrator's gaze, they become remarkable, just like the flowers in the flower bed. Woolf elevates the simple snail in much the same way. A completely ordinary snail completing the ordinary task of crawling through dirt becomes remarkable by zooming in and studying the creature's struggle around the leaf.
"Kew Gardens" was originally published as a pamphlet, and Woolf appears to mirror this format in her story. She includes four pairs of people: a married pair, two men, two women, and a young pair on a date. The "outer" two, couples one and four, mirror each other. They are both romantic male/female couples. The first is married with children and seemingly unhappy. The fourth is young and on an awkward early date. The "inner" two couples, couples two and three, also mirror and contrast each other. Both are platonic and same-sex. Couple two, two men, inhabit the same space but don't communicate. The same dynamic exists for couple three, two women who stop listening to each other as one loses herself in thought. Within each scene, Woolf contrasts gender binaries (Trissie and her suitor), romantic and platonic relationships, homo- and heterosexual longing (Eleanor and Simon), sanity and madness (William and his charge), and multiple other interpretations of the different ways relationships stack into the "vast nest of Chinese boxes" that amount to finding patterns amid life's chaos. By elevating small moments of life ceaselessly "turning [its] wheels and changing [its] gears," Woolf reaches her aim of showing her characters to be voices crying "aloud ... the petals of myriads of flowers flash[ing] their colors into the air." By the end of the story, Woolf likens the associations between human beings to the fleeting, beautiful flowers arranged for a time in a garden.
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in south west London has the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world. I arrived in early May, the day after the death of a close friend from a long illness. She had never visited Kew but her grandfather had been a gardener here. I had promised her that I would see the gardens for us both.
She is meticulous in using correct botanical names throughout and she writes with great enthusiasm to carry the reader with her on this very challenging quest to restore authenticity to the garden. They slowly start to feel that they can help many visitors see the garden very much the way it would have looked to Virginia and Leonard. The excellent photos taken by Caroline Arber certainly strengthen that feeling. We are very fortunate to have young people like Caroline, Jonathan and their volunteer helpers who are prepared to put in all the hard work of research, and real gardening expertise, to give us back these jewels of historic gardens.
This is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone interested in the restoration of an historic garden; in the lives of intelligent young people who work hard to restore such gardens and live in a national treasure and those who admire Virginia Woolf.
Snails don't get enough credit. Sure, they're slow and slimy, and they might wreak havoc on our gardens, but that doesn't mean they're not worthy of our love and affection. Seriously, when was the last time you ever heard someone say that snails were their favorite animals?
Among the 25 gardens he discusses, the author includes Packwood, Cottesbrooke and Great Dixter, all of which have long, distinguished pedigrees, so cannot exactly be called 'new'. But Richardson offers a robust defence of the gardens he has chosen. He is looking for evidence of new thinking and new ideas, but not necessarily in places that have been made from scratch.
In his essays on individual gardens, he frequently pays tribute to designers, particularly those of the Arts and Crafts period such as Lutyens, Robert Weir Schultz and Norman Jewson, who provided the bones essential to the success of the new clothes which now dress them. Even in a garden as uncompromising as Christine Facer's at Througham Court, Gloucestershire (made in the Charles Jencks mode of 'cosmic gardening'), Richardson notes the importance of Jewson's stonework in underpinning more transient modern additions.
I never understood the appeal of bonsai until I saw them displayed in gardens in China and Hong Kong, set out in carefully chosen positions, in very beautiful ceramic dishes, each one serenely occupying its space like some celestial sculpture.
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