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| Azaleas at Sissinghurst. Photo by Syd Cross |
Azaleas
A close relative of rhododendrons, azaleas are perennial
shrubs that bloom for several weeks in the spring in a wide variety of autumnal
colors from white to yellow, orange, red, pink, and lavender.
Relatively unimportant in Woolf’s fiction, azaleas make some
dramatic appearances in her life. Despite
its Victorian significance of “Temperance” (Greenaway 8), the shrub is “narcotic and poisonous in all its parts” (Folkard 134). Woolf’s associations with azaleas
seem irrevocably Victorian, perhaps tinged with some hidden frisson of
sensuality.
Woolf spent the summer of 1904
recovering from her second nervous breakdown following her father’s death under
the care of Violet Dickinson at her country home Welwyn. Dickinson was
unmarried and lived with her brother Ozzie, and the young Virginia Stephen
developed something of an adolescent crush on her. But the hallucinations she experienced during
her illness were forever associated with azaleas. In her
1921 contribution to the Memoir Club, “Old Bloomsbury,” she recalls having “lain in bed at the Dickinson’s house at Welwyn
thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was
using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson's azaleas”
(MOB 184). Despite the memory of the
curse-screening azaleas, the next year Virginia reported buying a
“flame-coloured azalea” on a walk down Tottenham Court Road (PA 239). Another
mention of red azaleas associates them with a moment of abjured passion: in a 1922
diary entry, she recounts a dinner with Logan Pearsall Smith, where sitting
next to Percy Lubbock reminded her of the night twelve years earlier when Lytton
Strachey had proposed to her; she remembered “I saw a red azalea fountain in
the middle of the dinner table; but not much else” (D2 211).
The rest of Woolf’s azalea
references are only in passing. In a 1927 letter to her sister from Rome, she records
encountering “great bushes of azaleas set in the paths”(L3 364). After a visit
to Waddeson greenhouse in April 1930, she recorded seeing “azaleas massed like
military bands” (D3 300). And in June of 1933, she writes to thank Lady Cecil
from sending her an azalea as an anonymous gift (L5 195).
The three times azaleas appear in
Woolf’s later fiction contain some distant echoes of these life
experiences. In Orlando, it is a nightingale that may be singing “among the
azaleas” while Orlando, in “an amorous acquiescent mood . . . as if spiced logs were burning and it was
evening,” listens to her husband Shermerdine’s account of sailing around Cape
Horn (O 188). In The Waves it is sensuous, party-conscious Jinny who fantasizes
about azaleas. Sitting together on a
sofa “under the cut flowers” with an unnamed man, she flirtatiously decorates
an imaginary Christmas tree, twisting observable facts about people into
tinsely ornamental stories, one about a man who stoops “even over an azalea”
and also over an old woman wearing diamond earrings (TW 126).
The association of azaleas with
moments of quiet intimacy reverts back to Violet Dickinson in a passage in The Pargiters, revised out of the final
version of The Years. As Ellen Hawkes points out, in the earlier
draft, it is Kitty who is in love with her tutor, Miss Craddock -- a
relationship Hawkes specifically identifies with Virginia Stephen’s attachment
to Violet (Hawkes “Magical Garden 37): “She treasured every word of praise that
Miss Craddock gave her; she invested all Miss Craddock’s relations with
glamour; kept every note she had from her” (TP 112). In the final version, the tutor has a bowl of
blue and white wildflowers, “stuck into a cushion of wet green moss,” sent from
the moors by her sister (TY 61), but in the original Kitty is the gift-giver;
she “left a pot of white azaleas at her lodging once when she was ill” (TP 112).
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