Kew Gardens

While “Kew Gardens” regularly shifts focus, the overarching structure of the story is deliberately symmetrical. The story opens with an abstract description of color emitting from the flowers “into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens” (84). The first character pair enters the scene, and they are followed by the first appearance of the snail. The second and third pairs enter and leave. The story continues with a further description of the snail, and the fourth character pair is introduced. In the final paragraph, the abstract imagery of the story’s opening is echoed in the “substance and colour” of the characters “dissolv[ing] in the green-blue atmosphere” (96).

The setting of the story is fixed on one specific flowerbed. The narrator remains rooted in this location, yet the story maintains a dynamic style by shifting focus between different characters. As each character passes the flowerbed, the narrator provides insight into their inner conflicts, relationships, and memories. While the setting is static, these shifts between consciousnesses provide a feeling of constant movement.

The story has numerous characters, but they share a common conflict, with each struggling to communicate effectively. While character dynamics vary, Woolf evaluates similar themes through each pair, such as Moments of Being, The Connection Between Humanity and Nature, and Interpersonal Conflict. The lives of the characters are ambiguous within the story. The narration includes brief hints to their inner desires and memories, but precise character details are kept to a minimum. The reader’s interactions with each character are similar to passing a person on the street or overhearing a stranger’s conversation. Given only a snapshot of each character, the reader must infer what they can from each person.

The narrative associates youth with nature. Thematically, youth connotes innocence, purity, optimism, and anticipation. Younger characters are more aware of life’s beauty, whether it be the physical beauty of the garden or the emotional beauty of young love. Trissie and her male companion embody youth in the story. Even though the couple initially speaks impersonally to each other, they recognize a mutually indefinable emotional power in their relationship. When their hands brush, each of them silently recognizes their intense connection. This feeling goes beyond physical attraction; their attachment is defined by anticipation of the unknown. Natural imagery expresses the youthful invigoration provided by Kew Gardens. The exuberant voices that emerge from the garden are compared to the “voices of children” (97), emphasizing the location’s raw purity. This youthful, harmonious atmosphere is juxtaposed with the disconnected personality of the older man who embodies the incongruity of tradition with the modern age.

In the story’s final paragraph, the narration zooms out from the hyper-focused location of the flowerbed to describe Kew Gardens in its entirety. There are several connections made between the natural world of the garden and the technologically advanced world of the city. For example, the comparison of the movements of a thrush to that of a “mechanical bird” is echoed in the airplane flying overhead. While the story has maintained close proximity to Kew Gardens (particularly in the snail descriptions), in the final lines, the narrative perspective grows increasingly distant. Now situated in the “summer sky,” the narrator describes Kew Gardens from a bird’s-eye view:

Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue (97).

Viewed from the sky, the people, plants, and animals of Kew Gardens are united in one visual plane.

In the concluding lines, Kew Gardens is depicted as mingling with the city outside its walls. The voices of the garden’s visitors merge with the sounds of London:

[A]ll the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air (97-98).

Woolf’s imagery, depicting machinery, industry, and technological change, contrasts drastically with the natural imagery of Kew Gardens. As the modernity of the city intrudes on the serenity of the scene, Woolf emphasizes that the spell the gardens cast is fleeting. The emotions the characters experience there will subside on their return to the city. Nevertheless, the text hints at the endurance of the natural world in the flowers that continue to bloom and in the butterflies that form the shape of a “shattered marble column” (96). This image alludes to the architecture of the fallen Roman empire, implying that if the metropolis of London falls, nature will continue regardless.