Rodmell Open Gardens

Virginia Woolf composed many of her novels sat in the small wooden lodge at the bottom of the garden in Monk’s House, and a lot of time entertaining many of the most important literary figures of the time - the likes of Vita Sackville-West, Maynard Keynes, TS Eliot, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry - on the lawn. The Woolfs bought the property in 1919, with the idea of using it as an occasional retreat, but found it more and more conducive to their changing needs, and by 1940, when their London home was damaged in the Blitz, they were pretty much full-time residents of the cottage, which they made more habitable in 1929 with a two-storey extension.

Before they extended the house, however, they extended the garden, buying an adjoining field to make sure they kept their precious view of Mount Caburn. The Woolfs used to enjoy playing croquet on the lawn, in the shade of some fine beech trees. The garden contains three ponds and a formal section with stone paths leading through yew hedges and herbaceous borders. In it you can view the plaque Leonard put up in memory of his wife after her suicide in 1941, with a quote from her novel ‘The Waves’. Leonard scattered her ashes under an elm just beyond the garden wall. You can visit the garden, among many others in Rodmell, as part of the village’s annual Open Garden event, and contemplate the role it played in helping inspire some of the most anguished and complex prose of the twentieth century. AG