‘Fritillary Fever’: Cultivating the Self and Gardening the World in the Writing of Clara Coltman Vyvyan

Abstract

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gertrude Bell imagines ‘home’ as an ‘enclosed garden’, the starting point of separation for an outward journey which traverses the boundary between a contained sense of self and of place and one that is transformed as borderless and wild. The enclosed garden is thus posited as an extension of the domestic sphere in opposition to the open liminal space of the ‘immeasurable world’ that ostensibly offers a release from the constraints of a fixed ‘elaborate social order’. As a site of domesticated nature it is unsurprising that gardens have been overwhelmingly represented in popular discourse as an annex of the home and, in turn, as largely the preserve of women. Even while they contest such discourses, critical analyses tend to emphasize and reproduce the notion of the garden as a private, static arena, by continually associating women with particular garden settings that function as extensions of domestic space. Karen Sayer for example examines representations of the cottage garden as a ‘private space or retreat from capital’ (2005: 34) and Catherine Alexander suggests the suburban garden as a domestic venue by virtue of its relationship to the house (2002).

To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered […] and, behold! the immeasurable world.

(Bell 1908: 1)