Bluebells
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| Spanish Bluebells at Monk's House; photo by Katie Ott |
The term “bluebell” is somewhat generic, most often
referring to varieties of Hyacinthoides
which are members of the hyacinth family, but also used in Scotland to refer to
Campanula (balloon-flowers) and in the United States to refer to Virginia
bluebells (Mertensia virginica). The common
British bluebell, which fills the woods with a carpet of deep vivid blue from
April onward, is H. non-scripta, not to be confused (or interbred with)
the Spanish bluebell H. hispanica. Both plants bear many small bell-shaped
flowers with curved or curly edges on stems that range from one to two feet in
height. The National Trust offers a helpful website that lists the chief distinctions
between the two species, the most obvious being that the native British bluebell
is bluer, has white pollen, and the flowers being all along one side of the
stem tends to droop noticeably. <https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/plants/wild-flowers/bluebell
; accessed 3/2/20>
Although Spanish bluebells now grow
freely in the garden at Monk’s House, all the mentions of bluebells in Woolf’s
life writing refer to flowers seen elsewhere, the deep indigo blue of the
flower and the fragility of the stem being particularly notable. In 1926, on a trip to Dorset, Woolf remarked
on how pale the spring flowers looked, “anemones, bluebells, violets, all pale,
sprinkled about, without color” (D3). The multi-color paleness suggests the
bluebells in question were Spanish, but there is no evidence that Woolf was
aware of the different varieties.
Evidently, Woolf saw the bluebell as a particularly British flower, for
on a trip to France in 1931, she described a walk by the river in a flat green
landscape including “An Elizabethan meadow -- cowslips, bluebells” (D4
22). A few years later, she used the
fragile drooping posture of the bluebell to describe the thirty-six year old
David Cecil, “a thin slip of a man: like the stalk of a bluebell” (D5
127). She repeats this metaphor two
years later when she recounts a visit from her nephew Quentin, who appears to
be a “rosy sun” next to the “pale slip of a blue bell stalk” that is Paul
Gardener, a young man who writes poetry (D5 261).
This painterly contrast between the
yellow of the sun and the blue of the flowers (the two colors are
complementary; think how often Van Gogh pairs them) is brought out in two other
instances recorded in the last volume of her diary. In May of 1938, driving from Monk’s House to
London, she observes the bright colors “in the clear May morning light”: the
yellow laburnum, “pink on the may, & various fine shades of gold red &
bluebell blue on the trees” (D5 139). A
similar contrast pleases her the following June as she is walking through the Bluebell
woods at Sissinghurst: “And I liked the soft cream & yellow flowers on the
sunny grass… and the thread of bright bluebells: & Vita in her breeches”
(D5 218).
There are only
four times bluebells bloom in Woolf’s non-life writing -- all of them, despite
the flower’s Victorian meaning of “Constancy” (Greenaway 10) somewhat
evanescent and casual. The earliest,
“The Mysterious Case of Miss V” (1906), compares tracking down the elusive
character of Miss V to visiting “the shadow of a bluebell in Kew Gardens” --
probably a reference to the famous Bluebell Wood Walk near Queen Charlotte’s
Cottage in Kew Gardens -- or to catching “the down from a dandelion at midnight
in a Surrey meadow” (CSF 31). Travelling on the train through Sussex in “An
Unwritten Novel” (1920), the narrator comments that in summer the bluebells in
the woods “flit and fly” by (CSF 115). The
thin stalks and contrast to yellow reappear in “The Evening Party” (1918) where
the narrator praises all the pleasures her hands have brought her, among them
“snapp[ing] blue bells and daffodils” (CSF 99).
And the blue and yellow flowers are paired again in A Room of One’s Own (1929) in the “wild and open” gardens of
Fernham where “daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of
times, and now wind-blown and waving” are “sprinkled and carelessly flung”
among the long grasses (AROO 17).
See Works Cited Page for full documentation
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