Chestnut Blossoms
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| Chestnut Blossoms in a London Park |
Chestnut Blossoms
Known for its edible nuts, the chestnut (Castanea) belongs
to the beech family. The mostly
white, male flowers are borne in long, upright catkins while the female flowers
are small clusters near the base of the stem that turn into the spiky burrs
enclosing the fruit. The long,
oval-shaped leaves pan out in a circular fan, with the largest leaf in the
center.
For Woolf, chestnuts are another of those plants
that mark the passage of time. In her
autobiographical essay of 1908 “Reminscences” she recalls, “There were
smells and flowers and dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished
the seasons” (MOB 29). For the most part
however, Woolf wrote about chestnuts blooming in the gardens of London and
Cambridge, often in the evening, the lacy spires of flowers inspiring some of
her most notable metaphors.
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| Chestnut tree at Woolf's studio (EKS) |
Many
of Woolf’s biographical chestnuts appear in London and at Monk’s House. In November of 1917 she recalls how, walking
towards Kew with Leonard, she ”noticed how the great chestnut trees [were] as
black as iron (D1 11). In April of 1920,
experiencing her first spring at at Monk’s House she contrasts “that iron
blackness of the chestnut trunks” with the soft tints of spring including the
opening of the chestnuts, “the little parasols spread on our window tree” (D2
28, 29. In January of 1927 a great chestnut in the churchyard adjoining Monk’s
house fell on one of Leonard’s new fruit trees (L3 317), and in September 1935,
the sight of Virginia prevented some school boys from climbing over the wall to
steal chestnuts, presumably from the very tree that still hovers over her
writing studio.
I In the 1920’s, Woolf’s fictional chestnuts
are all in Cambridge. “A Woman’s College
from the Outside” (1920) begins in a romantic moonlit setting: “The
feathery-white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut
blossoms were white in the green, and dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows”
(CSF 145). Chestnut flowers appear in
similarly evocative settings in Jacob’s
Room (1922). Timothy Durrant’s sense of privilege receives “reassurance
from all sides, the trees blowing, the grey spires soft in the blue”; he is
surrounded by the potent air of the month of May: “the elastic air with its particles--
chestnut bloom, pollen. . . blurring the trees, gumming the air” (35). The same
moonlight scene that graced the women’s college is repeated word-for-word in
Trinity Great Court: “The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all
night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow parsley in
the meadow” (JR 37). This sense of
decorative fertility continues as Jacob prepares to leave London for his Grand
Tour to Paris and then Greece where the chestnut trees seem to wave goodbye to
him in one of Woolf’s most delightful metaphors: “The chestnuts have flirted
their fans” (JR 37), a last Edenic gesture slightly undercut by being followed
by a vision of carnivorous butterflies: “Perhaps the Purple Emperor is
feasting. . . upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree” (37) --
possibly suggesting that all that grace and privilege will come at a price.
I In the 1930’s chestnut blossoms become
more varied. There is another -- less benign-- nighttime scene involving
chestnut trees at a boy’s school in The
Waves, where Dr. Crane, a man convinced “of his immense superiority,” looks
out his window while writing on a stormy night and sees the stars flashing
between the chestnut trees which are “ploughing up and down,” almost as if the
flowers had flown off and turned into stars (TW 35). However, in her diary entries of the
mid-thirties Woolf concentrates mostly on their spring flowering. In April
1933, chestnut blossoms evoke another, more feminine metaphor about light.
After walking down to the Serpentine one evening with Leonard, she describes
“Chestnuts in their crinolines, bearing tapers” (152). In 1935, as Woolf makes “vegetable notes” for
the book that would become The Years, she
records three more diary entries detailing stages in the growing process as she
observes the flowering trees in Regent’s Park. On March 28, she creates another
memorable metaphor when she accurately observes that some chestnut leaves “are
in the birds claw stage” (D4 292); then on March 30, she records, “Some
chestnut trees in the Park just coming out” (D4 294); and, finally a month
later on April 28, she announces, “Chestnuts just beginning to flower” (D4
307).
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| American Chestnut in the "bird's claw" stage EKS |
The passage in The Years about chestnut blossoms that results from these
observations combines a number of previous elements, especially the sense of
dancing light the spire of flowers so often evokes for Woolf. Seen on a day
dappled with sunshine instead of moonshine, Kensington Gardens is lyrically
Edenic: “a primal innocence seemed to brood over the scene” (TY 229). “Netted with floating lights from between the
leaves,” the women in the garden appear to be suspended in an Impressionist
painting “composed of lozenges of floating colours” (TY 229). In a variation of the night scene in The Waves, the flowers’ movement in the wind
again reveal flashes of light: “The pink
and white chestnut blossoms rode up and down as the branches moved in the
breeze. The sun dappling the leaves gave everything a curious look of
unsubstantiality as if it were broken into separate points of light” (TY 229). That same sense of movement is repeated in
the 1939 short story, “The Searchlight” where “The trees were in full leaf, and
had there been a moon, one could have seen the pink and cream coloured cockades
on the chestnut trees”and where “rods of light wheeled across the sky” revealing
“here a cadaverous stone front; here a chestnut tree with all its blossoms
riding” (CSF 269).
The only symbolic meaning I could uncover for chestnut
blossoms was Greenaway’s double attribution “Do me justice. Luxury” (12).
Shifting from the privileged location of men’s schools to the more
democratic and feminine purlieus of London gardens, the lacy candelabras that
mark the coming of spring excite Woolf to do them justice by the fantastic
accuracy of her descriptions.
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