THE ART OF GARDENING

The gardens of Charleston, once home to painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the artistic residence of the Bloomsbury Group, are maintained in the spirit of that age

- CHARLIE HARPUR

Not a gentleman's garden or a gardener's garden, it was always an artist's garden, recalled the writer Angelica Garnett when she reflected on the garden that her parents created at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex.

An early product of Bloomsbury Group horticulture, it was, according to Garnett's half-brother Quentin Bell, a 'dense mass of flowers, overwhelming in their variety of colour'. It was, he said, 'a painters' garden.

Charleston lies at the foot of the chalky, windswept hills of the South Downs, which provide a fitting canvas for the walled garden's post-Impressionist colour. In 1916, writer Virginia Woolf encouraged her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, to rent the farmhouse, a major draw being its 'charming garden, with a pond, fruit trees and vegetables, all now rather run wild'. For Bell, there was another more pressing reason for making the move, as her fellow painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had fallen in love, and his lover David 'Bunny' Garnett, would be able to avoid conscription into the army if they worked on the farm. By the autumn of that year, the deal was sealed and the Bloomsbury era at Charleston began.

Within the now iconic hollyhock-strewn half-acre walled garden, the priority at first was to grow food for the new occupants of the cold and dilapidated farmhouse. Almost immediately, however, some design help was sought. Having recently designed his own garden with the help of Gertrude Jekyll, fellow Bloomsbury Group member Roger Fry was called on to lay out the walled garden in a similar fashion: linear gravel paths and borders leading from the house, flanking a large lawn, with a box hedge to separate the vegetable garden at the north end.