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| Seattle Dahlia by EKS |
Dahlias
The dahlia is a
brightly colored ornamental perennial from Mexico with tuberous roots. A member of the daisy family, Asteraceae, the wild species originally
had only five petals, with a yellow center and scarlet red “rays” (Ward 117).
The first species brought to Europe was probably D. variables; owing to difficulties growing the tropical plant, it
took three tries to get it started in English greenhouses. The original plants
arrived from Madrid in 1789, but promptly died.
In 1804, Lady Holland sent seeds from Madrid to Holland House, but they
only lasted a year or two. In 1815, more dahlias were brought from Paris,
including some of the spectacular new double varieties, and the fortunes of the
plant increased steadily from then on (Dean 4-7). There is thus a direct if
tenuous connection between Woolf and the introduction of British dahlias as her
mother, Julia Princep Stephen, was a favorite at Little Holland House, the
dower house on Lady Holland’s estate occupied by the Princep family from
1850-71. The dahlia proved immensely popular with over 20,000 named cultivars,
classified by the size, shape, and density of the flowers including
Single-Flowered, Waterlily (fully double but slightly flat), Decorative (double,
slightly rounded), Ball (more rounded), Pompom (nearly spherical), Cactus
(spikey, quilled rays) (Hogan 466-9).
Perhaps because
they are such recent arrivals, there are few mythical referents, folktales, or
literary allusions to dahlias. The most
interesting I found had to do with the mention of “double dahlias” in a long,
very funny poem of 1843 Miss Kilmansegg
and Her Precious Leg by the humorist Thomas Hood, satirizing the greed of
those who are very wealthy (cited by Ward 119). The titular figure -- whose
name seems reminiscent of Miss Kilman in Mrs.
Dalloway -- is so obsessed with riches in the form of gold that when she
breaks her leg riding a runaway horse, she has it replaced by a solid gold one,
almost bankrupting her family and in the end inciting her own murder by a
determined robber. There are numerous passages in the poem describing the totally
golden world occupied by the Killmansegg family that are also reminiscent of
the banquet scene in “Lappin and Lapinova” (CSF 264-5). Woolf knew of Hood; in
1908 she wrote a review of a new biography in which she referred to him as a
man “with a brain full of puns” (E1 161).
For the most
part, dahlias appear in Woolf’s work simply as garden flowers; at least a quarter
are in diaries and letters commenting on the garden at Monk’s House, where
dahlias were one of Leonard’s favorite flowers. In his Account Book, Leonard records buying them 9 times between 1929 and 1939, the most frequent flowers he purchased. For a brief period in the mid
1920’s dahlias in Woolf’s writing, accompanied by insects, become domestic set
pieces in old-fashioned Victorian gardens, but Woolf’s life-long consistent
thematic emphasis is on the bright, burning, and blazing warmth of color they
provide, often associated with the heat typical of their peak blooming season
in August.
Virginia’s
first recorded dahlia, mentioned in a journal entry of 1906, describes a
Catholic priest examining “with long ecclesiastical nose the Dahlias in his
neighbors garden” (PA 315). There is a slightly competitive pride of display
here characteristic of many appearances of dahlias in her life writing. At
Asheham, only one dahlia survived the initial cleanup of the garden beds in
August 1917 (D1 39), and Virginia celebrated its blooming in September --
“Dahlia fully out in the bed” (D1 52) -- but it was the move to Monk’s House that
fully inoculated the Woolfs with dahlia fever. A letter from Virginia to
Barbara Bagenal reveals that by 1922 they had already begun to acquire
specialized knowledge of particular cultivars.
Complaining about the fierce September rains, Woolf grumbles that she
has her “work cut out, merely raising the dahlias from the ground” and jokes
about a flower evidently named after their friend: “Chickybiddiensis Bagenalia
is doing very well,” showing by her parody that she is at least familiar with the
scientific nomenclature Leonard used (L2 558).
Throughout
the twenties, Woolf’s references to dahlias have a persistently domestic and
somewhat humorous aura. In 1920, she wittily compares their servant Lottie’s
head to “a dahlia in disarray” (L2 439). A typically tongue in cheek account of
life at Tidmarsh in a 1923 letter to Gerald Brenan describes “many ducks and
kittens in and out of the rooms” and casts Lytton as “some dragon-fly, which
visits dahlias, limes, holly-hock and then poses, quite unconcerned, in the lid
of a broken tea-pot” -- Carrington and Ralph’s relationship being the teapot
(L3 65). In a scene perhaps reminiscent of Little Holland House, a 1924 review
of her friend Molly McCarthy’s autobiography, Nineteenth Century Childhood, praises how beautifully McCarthy catches the Victorian insects of her mother’s generation
having tea on the lawn: “There they are, fluttering and feasting on their dahlias
and their ivy blossoms” (E3 444). The image of butterflies poising on dahlias
is so appealing that it becomes somewhat of a leitmotif in her 1925 Common Reader essay “Rambling Round
Evelyn” on the diarist John Evelyn who lived from 1620-1706. Characteristically,
the flowers appear three times, repeatedly evoking a sense of the simplicity
and serenity of Evelyn’s mind “lying in a chair with a book; watching the
butterflies on the dahlias” (E4 91; see also 92, 97). The fact that dahlias wouldn’t
be widely available in England for almost two hundred years was either not
known to Woolf or didn’t bother her. The dahlias of childhood remembered by
Millicent Bruton in Mrs. Dalloway,
published that same year, have a similar context: “there were her father
and mother on the lawn under the trees, with the tea-things out, and the beds of
dahlias, the hollyhocks, the pampas grass” (109). Given these pervasive
Victorian referents, it is no wonder that Sally Seaton cutting the heads off
dahlias and floating them in bowls is seen as such a shocking violation of
tradition (MD 34).
Another, perhaps
less Victorian attribute of dahlias also begins to appear in the 1920’s, as
Woolf emphasizes the warmth of their brilliant color. The first dahlias to
appear in Woolf’s fiction are red. Jacob’s
Room begins with Betty Flanders shedding tears over her separation from
Captain Barfoot, tears which “made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in
red waves” (4). The color combination of
red and yellow first appears, juxtaposed to autumnal gloom, in an October 1926
letter to Gerald Brenan, then living in Spain: “It is pitch dark in the room
now, except for a very coarse strong lamp, which blazes my eyes out, and
illumines a pot of brilliant red and yellow dahlias” (L3 297).
Perhaps it is
this very pot that appears in To the
Lighthouse which Woolf was drafting around the same time. The holograph MS
of the novel only mentions dahlias once, in Chapter IX of “Time Passes” where “poppies
sowed themselves among the dahlias” (TTL 141). In the holograph, the poppies
are “wild,” therefore probably red, and the color palette includes the blue of
cornflowers (TTLHD 227). In her revision, Woolf creates another triadic
thematic cluster by inserting two more dahlia displays: first she substitutes
dahlias for evening primroses “in the big bed” when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey walk the
garden at twilight (TTLHD 118, TTL 69;); then at the beginning of “Time Passes” when the errant
winds first begin to prowl the deserted house, she replaces a swelling bluish-white
jar full of roses with “a bowl of red and yellow dahlias” (TTLHD 204; TTL 130).
Here the revised passage intensifies the contrast between the warmth associated
with the house’s inhabitants and the approaching dark, removing the blue of the
vase. In the revision of external propagation,
“Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias,” the blue of the cornflowers is
similarly removed (TTL 141).[1]
However thematically appropriate, choosing
dahlias as an autumnal blaze in To the
Lighthouse did cause Woolf something of a practical headache. In May of
1927 she received a letter from one Lord Olivier rebuking her horticultural
inaccuracy. As she wrote to her sister Vanessa, he maintained that her “natural
history is in every instance wrong: there are no rooks, elms, or dahlias in the
Hebrides (L3 379). In her reply to Lord
Olivier, Woolf meekly bows to his superior knowledge: “Dahlias I surrender to
you. In fact I yield altogether to your horticultural learning” (“Some New Letters” 182). However, she
did not prune her dahlias from the novel.
Of
a piece with her previous botanical errors, satirically acknowledged in its
Preface, the three dahlias which appear in
Orlando a year later represent more crucial mistakes in flower lore, being
in all cases examples of the accidental anachronisms carelessly scattered
throughout the mock biography. Hurriedly dressing to meet Queen Elizabeth, who
actually came to Vita Sackville-West’s ancestral home Knole in 1573, Orlando
dons shoes “with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias”(O 16), a simile
whose vehicle anticipates its tenor by at least two-hundred and fifty years. When,
sometime in the next century, Orlando decides to refurbish her country home,
she over-fills her garden with “snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias,
roses, lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties” (O 81), predating the
actual cultivation of dahlias in England by nearly two-hundred years. Finally,
the dahlias which sleep in her garden in the eighteenth century, though
“dormant,” are still a century too early (O 127). As is so often true of Woolf’s flower
references, all three dahlias were added after the holograph draft was written
as ornamental girders establishing thematic continuity
Right
after the publication of Orlando, in
June of 1929, Leonard began what became a nearly annual ritual of buying
dahlias from Dobbies, a Scottish mail order catalogue, with the purchase of
fifteen plants. In the next ten years, he only twice missed making his regular
order (1936-7), according to Caroline Zoob “trying new varieties every year”
(138). That Virginia participated in the research that went into choosing new
varieties is made clear by the note in her diary of that same month: “I ought
to correct A Room of one’s own: I ought
to read & correct I ought to write several
dull silly letters; to gentlemen in Maidstone & Kingston who tell me facts about
dahlias” (D3 233).
Between 1930 and
her death in 1941, Woolf mentions dahlias nearly twice as often in her life
writing as in her prose for publication, often pairing them as Leonard did in
the garden with lilies or zinnias. In “On Being Ill” (1930) there is a passing
mention of dahlias along with gladioli and lilies in the catalogue of flowers
as “the most self-sufficient of all things that humans have made companions”
(E5 199). And in The Waves (1931)
Louis recalls “The whisper of leaves, water running down gutters, green depths
flecked with dahlias or zinnias” (TW 167). The image of the burning bush of
dahlias comes up in a September 1930 letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies where
in the midst of “vile weather” Woolf affirms that “Leonards garden has really
been a miracle—vast white lilies, and such a blaze of dahlias that even today
one feels lit up” (L4 213). A year later, she notes in her diary that “L.'s
yellow dahlias are burning on the edge of the terrace” (D4 46). When, in August
of 1932, Woolf faints in the garden, she describes the event to Lady Nelly
Cecil in terms which again associate dahlias with warm weather: “I've been
celebrating the heat by tumbling in a faint among Leonard's dahlias.” The
familiar topos of illumination by
dahlias reoccurs in Flush (1933) and The Years (1937). Transferring a kind of
metonymic glow, Flush splashes “into the middle of dahlia beds; break[ing]
brilliant, glowing red and yellow roses” (66).
And the long beds of dahlias at Kitty Lasswade’s estate in the north of
England in The Years are described as
“flaming” (84).
After Julian
Bell’s death in 1937, however, dahlias recede into the private world of the
garden at Monk’s House, where they retain their brilliant warmth as beacons against
despair. Asking herself what can
possibly remain “real” after Julian’s death, Woolf’s answer includes “Angelica
in a yellow handkerchief picking dahlias for the flower show,” revealing that
Leonard too had become competitive in his dahlia growing (D5 109). As the Blitz
begins in London she echoes “Time
Passes,” noting “Meanwhile the aeroplanes are on the prowl,
crossing the downs. Every preparation is made. Sirens will hoot in a particular
way when there's the first hint of a raid. L. & I no longer talk about it.
Much better to play bowls & pick dahlias. They're blazing in the sitting
room, orange against the black last night” (D5 167). Finally, an August 1939
missive to Ethyl Smythe describes Woolf and Leonard once more surrounded by the
flowers’ protective warmth: “down here, grilling in the garden -- a forest of
dahlias and zinnias”(L6 352).
See Works Cited Page for full documentation
See Works Cited Page for full documentation
[1]
Although neither discusses this particular color contrast, Jack’s Stewart’s two
essays on color in To the Lighthouse
and Jane Goldman’s chapter on the novel in her Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia
Woolf suggest similar dialectical patterns.
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