We sit down on a stone bench in the garden’s sunniest corner, where he’s laid out papers and books with gardener’s hands. ![]() ![]() I call out to Harry and he waves a long arm he’s agreed to speak to me about Charleston’s garden and Vanessa’s role in it. A sprinkler chugs guiltily against the birdsong. It’s been dry: no rain, no April showers nearly all month. The tulips are out, the last of the narcissi, the apple trees are budding, but no blossom yet. He’s bent down but when he stands up his head of unruly curls is level with the top of the garden wall gates. I walk through the gap in the walls that surround the house and spot Harry, Charleston’s gardener. Women make gardens for many reasons, but here was one that appeared to be a muse. Bell and Grant’s daughter, Angelica Garnett, wrote that Charleston’s garden “was not a gentleman’s garden or a gardener’s garden, it was always an artist’s garden”. There’s a neat square of lawn with a tiled rectangular pond in the middle, but even now, on one of April’s last warm days, the overwhelming sense is one of gorgeous rebellion. Piebald walls of flint and brick hold roses and apple trees and cloud-pruned box hedges. The best bit is the walled garden, which fans out from the back of the house. From most places, you can see the Sussex Downs rumple out beneath like a quilt. Sculptures made by Quentin Bell, Vanessa’s son, loom between the boughs. David Hockney, Lightroom review: An immersive show that synthesises Hockney’s career in utterly beguiling fashionĬharleston is surrounded by its grounds: a gulp of a lake, still carrying a tethered rowing boat on its water, an orchard of gnarled medlars, a snicket of tall trees.‘Me and Jack Nicholson were put in a convoy to meet Putin’: Sean Penn on his Zelensky film and the future of Ukraine.‘Upskirting wasn’t just pervs on the tube’: Jemima Khan on tabloid culture, her debut romcom and Diana.This is what happened when I sought answers to questions I couldn’t ask her myself. ![]() The flowers she grew with her sometime lover and life partner dovetailed with her work. I’d admired Bell’s work for decades, it had spoken to me while I was in my teens but she’d also been a voracious gardener. I spoke to 45 of them, and one man: Harry Hoblyn, head gardener at Charleston, to better understand the lesser-known creation of the late painter Vanessa Bell. The women I spoke to were refugees and rehabilitating prisoners, divorcees of chocolate fortune heirs and drag kings. The two – gardening and womanhood – were entwined. What I got in return were generous, fascinating and intimate stories about women’s lives. And so I went out, across the country and, later, the continent, to speak with strangers about their relationship with the land. ![]() From my own experience as a self-taught, urban gardener, I knew there was more to our connection with the earth than pruning roses I wanted to delve into the power, resistance and politics of why we grow. But in the first instance, I just wanted to find out why women gardened – something that for so long has been considered a quiet, if not quaint, and often rarefied pursuit. Isolated, like many, by lockdown, I now realise I was seeking the company and wisdom of others to help make sense of the changes happening in my life as the world became ever more unrecognisable. My new book, Why Women Grow, emerged from a state of longing I didn’t initially understand.
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