Virginia Woolf is maybe best known for her novels like Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Orlando.
These novels are all exquisite in their own right, but I also find Virginia Woolf’s early short story, “Kew-Gardens,” in her collection Monday or Tuesday (1921), to be one of my favorite works from Woolf and maybe in all of the literature I’ve read.
“Kew-Gardens” is set in the eponymous Kew Gardens in London (pictured below).
It has a really fascinating narrative structure that moves between a garden-bed (yes, like a garden-bed with flowers and leaves and SNAILS) and visitors to Kew Gardens who pass by the garden-bed.
This is a video lesson I made for a science communication class I recently took. In this video, I talk about “Kew-Gardens” and how it can help us think about our relationship with the natural world.
I’m trying to make the argument that in this story, Woolf shows the way human and nonhuman narratives are interwoven with one another. Human struggles are mirrored in the natural world via a snail in a garden-bed and the snails struggles are likewise mirrored in the human characters in the story.
By doing this kind of weaving, Woolf shows a multispecies community at work in this story. By a multispecies community, I mean a world that shows humans exist always in relation to nonhumans. Like a web. I talk about this throughout the video, and I hope you enjoy watching.
Caylee, what a delight! I thoroughly enjoyed both your presentation and the sound map exercise. Amazing how much communion can occur within the space of 5 minutes in a garden. It was fun to imagine motives of song birds and locusts, but it was easiest to impute to the donkey across the street whose braying surely said, "It's dinnertime!!" thanks for your generous offering.