Virginia Woolf

Kew Gardens Virginia Woolf

Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July. The figures of these men and women straggled past the flowerbed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed.

Kew Gardens encapsulates the flair of modernism and Woolf’s pioneering literary style. Set in the titular ­botanical garden in south-west London on a warm summer day, the story is a collection of glimpses into the lives of four groups of visitors. Told in intricate and lavish detail by an unnamed narrator, the story has no unifying narrative. Rather, it follows the visitors as they meander past a lustrous bed of flowers – giving a fleeting snippet of their lives: their memories, associations and reflections, all spurred by the spawling greenery.