Perennial Bloomsbury

The creative troupe that ruled the English countryside in the early 1900s had a muse wilder than its lifestyle: the Charleston garden, reborn here in four riotous arrangements.

- GRACE HAYNES

In 1918 ART CRITIC ROGER FRY transformed an overgrown walled garden filled with vegetables and fruit trees at Charleston, a redbrick farmhouse nestled in the East Sussex countryside, into a living work of art. The rural home had become a refuge for members of the effervescent Bloomsbury group, a creative coterie of artists, writers, and intellectuals who countered the prim-and-proper Edwardian-era culture with antibourgeois ideals and other unconventional pursuits. Case in point: fleeing London in 1916 as World War I raged, seeking farmwork so the pacifist circle's male members could avoid military service and devote their lives to their craf