About 98 Flowers

10/1/2024

Welcome to the Virginia Woolf Herbarium.  For many years I have been researching and writing about Virginia Woolf and parks, gardens, and flowers.  Many of my published articles on these subjects are available on my Academia.edu site. https://clemson.academia.edu/ElisaKaySparks   All along I have been collecting a vast amount of material: lists and counts of all the flowers in Woolf's fictional, non-fictional, and biographical works; information on the literary, medicinal, and mythological meanings of flowers; research on the history of gardens and gardening and on the social assumptions and practices involving flowers and gardening.  During the pandemic I distilled much of this research into a series of 98 essays, one on each flower mentioned at least once in her fiction and/ or essays (There are about a dozen more which she mentions only in diaries and letters; see Flower Count). Recent access to digital searches for over 600 of her essays continues to expand my counts, which cannot claim to be absolutely definitive as there are many sources (such as Woolf's early journals) which have not yet been digitalized, and I seem to discover some new rose or other flower which I had not noticed every few months.

I have been having so much fun writing these essays and have been discovering such a complex web of intersecting allusions and references that I am impatient to share. So I have decided to e-publish them as here on this blog. (The total word count is 170,000 words, which seems to intimidate publishers, and I want this information to remain open-source and available to as many Woolf readers as possible)  All of these essays should be thought of as being in a nearly final but still draft state. In order to declutter the essays, I have used parenthetical documentation which refers to the comprehensive Works Cited posted on this site (Apologies ahead of time for formatting issues in the bibliography; it is very difficult to chase down fugitive bits of HTML code which can randomly re-size a font or turn it, say, blue. And I confess that I still need to edit to make sure I have included all sources)  Occasionally I will footnote a source only in an on-line reference that can be linked to, usually because that is the only time it is referenced. I have used the standard abbreviations for Woolf’s works in parenthetical citations throughout; that list is also available on this site.

Each essay tends to start out with a basic botanical identification and description of the plant, continue to some meandering and recondite speculations on associated literary and mythological allusions, then go on to a generally chronological treatment of its appearances in Woolf's life and work, working towards a holistic discussion of what the flower seems to mean to Woolf.  An annotated list of the reference sources I consulted most frequently for this research is posted on the site.  I have gratefully relied as well on the work of dozens of other Woolf scholars, whom I cite perhaps too copiously for grace, but I hope to leave plenty of tracks for subsequent scholars. In so far as I have had time and patience, I have also looked at the holograph manuscripts of various novels and different editions of different essays so as to track how Woolf’s use of flowers evolved through her writing process. (While I include some of these references in my essays when they are particularly notable, I have not included them in my flower counts.) Inevitably, I have come across a number of fascinating insights  -- into Woolf’s methods of creating structural unity, into possible sources in the great lumber-room of Woolf’s omnivorous reading, into hidden or coded or ironic significances.  Indeed, for almost every flower/ essay there was a moment of discovery, an easter egg of delight that I couldn’t wait to share with the wider Woolf community.  Hence this blog.

Another advantage in publishing these essays on-line is the ease of including illustrations.  At first I simply wanted to include a photograph or other clear rendering of each flower.  I was not sure what an asphodel looked like, or bog myrtle, or sea-holly, and I suspected many readers of Woolf would be at a similar loss.  As I began to consult giant floral reference works, look up species on the Internet, and try to take photos of flowers myself, I began to understand that the appearance of these flowers is often quite important and tells us things about their meanings that are not obvious to those who know only their names and how they have been used in Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti.  For example, an illustrated listing of all the flowers in Jacob’s Room reveals that many of the blossoms are purple, spiky, and composed of many small flowers symmetrically arrayed, allowing some interesting speculation as to Woolf’s adaptation of the pastoral elegy’s use of purple flowers.  

Each essay thus has a headpiece illustration, with the source identified in the caption.  Some of these are pictures I took, often on site, such as the escallonia hedge and the forget-me-nots at Talland House, the apple orchard and bluebells at Monk's House, wallflowers at Charleston, wisteria in Richmond, water lilies at Kew, foxgloves and fritillaries at Sissinghurst. Some of these are botanical illustrations, usually from Wikipedia Commons or other open source websites.  Since I am a printmaker, I have sometimes indulged myself by including woodcuts I have made of particular flowers.  As the project developed, I sometimes found myself wanting to include other illustrations-- a picture of varieties of fritillary butterflies from Coleman’s British Butterflies which Woolf owned as a child, is one example -- and so I have felt free to link to those whenever I have access to images which can be used without permissions.

If you are energetic or interested enough to read through these essays chronologically, you will see that their style, structure, and comprehensiveness has continued to develop over the couple of years I have been working on them. As I make new discoveries, I tend to circle back and update -- another great advantage of digital publishing.  In fact, I have already selectively revised pieces when I have run across mistakes or exciting new information, as always happens during such encyclopedic projects. 

Now that I have explored Woolf flower by flower, I am turning to a more conventional academic approach and am preparing a manuscript discussing her flower references chronologically, book by book, so to speak, except that I am including short stories, essays, and notes from life-writing.  When that comes out, this blog will continue to exist as a companion volume.