‘I’M PAINTING FLOWERS—ONE CAN’T RESIST THEM’
s a young, wide-eyed devotee of writer Virginia Woolf, my first visit to Monk’s House was an emotional one. Her East Sussex cottage, populated with tourists and well-meaning guides wielding laminated photos of the past, didn’t give away its secrets. But the garden had something to say. There were the pockets of green lawn where Virginia had weeded out ‘thick dandelions’, her writing room lodged under a horse chestnut tree – a sanctuary with a view – and the zinnias, upright in the borders, favourites of her husband Leonard and namechecked in her letters. Her last diary entry
