The Garden at Charleston: A Bloomsbury Garden through the Seasons

by Sue Snell

Frances Lincoln Publishers; hardcover, 2010; 112 pages; ISBN10: 0711231125, ISBN13: 978-0711231122; list price: $25.

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

Charleston, the country house in the Sussex Downs that became home in 1916 to Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, his lover David Garnett, and her sons Julian and Quentin, has long held interest for its association with the Bloomsbury circle and its role as a place of retreat and refuge for an extended family of their friends and kinsmen. The house and its grounds had immediate appeal and potential. It would also offer sanctuary and agricultural employment to Duncan Grant and David Garnett, both of whom were conscientious objectors to war service.

Virginia Woolf described Charleston to her sister in a letter on 14 May 1916, written after her husband Leonard Woolf had inspected the property. The Woolfs then had a summer house at Asheham, located some four miles from Charleston.

I wish you'd leave Wissett, and take Charleston. Leonard went over it, and says it's a most delightful house and strongly advises you to take it. It is about a mile from Firle, on that little path which leads under the downs. It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely. The house is very nice, with large rooms, and one room with big windows fit for a studio. At present it is used apparently as a weekend place, . . . . They say it only takes half an hour to walk to Glynde Station, through the Park, and you have Firle, with its telephone, quite near, so you would be more accessible than we are. There is a w. c. and a bathroom, but the bath only has cold water. The house wants doing up—and the wallpapers are awful. But it sounds a most attractive place—and 4 miles from us, so you wouldn't be badgered by us.

Vanessa Bell took Charleston and the property flourished. She and Duncan Grant were both talented artists, and at Charleston they painted pictures on canvas, paintings that were given to friends, exhibited, and sold, and others that remained in the place of their making. In the rooms of Charleston, they also painted its doors and cupboards, tables, chairs, and dressers. Its interior decoration embodied a love of color and the artistry of two painters who made a home at Charleston unlike any other in Britain. While they also had studios and lodgings in London and a house at Cassis, it was to Charleston that they both returned again and again, and stayed during the last years of their lives. Vanessa Bell died at Charleston in 1961, and the house remained home to Duncan Grant until his death in 1978. In 1981 the Charleston Trust was established to restore the house and renew its gardens, a project that was generously supported by Lila Acheson Wallace. Today the house and gardens at Charleston are open for visit from April to October.