The Artist’s Garden in To the Lighthouse (1927)

Moving the Tree: The Artist’s Garden in To the Lighthouse (1927).
Karina Jakubowicz’s lecture in our 2026 Woolf Summer Course

So now [Lily] always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air.

- Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Part I

From the turbulent ocean beyond the Ramsays’ summer home, to the forked pear tree and flowerbeds in the garden surrounding the house, To the Lighthouse is full of images of nature that radiate with significance.

As we see in Lily’s painting of the garden, these motifs are not simply decorative or benign. Rather, they are places of struggle for identity and self-worth.

This lecture explores the importance of nature and the garden to Woolf’s thinking about gender in the novel. What does the garden mean to Mrs Ramsay, Victorian wife, mother, and gardener? And what does it mean to Lily, a modern woman and an artist who chooses not to marry? And how, in turn, does the garden shape these different visions of womanhood? Karina will explore these questions and more in her lecture in our 2026 Virginia Woolf Summer Course.

We will study To the Lighthouse and four other great novels in our five-day summer course in 2026. Our theme is Virginia Woolf and the Natural World. There will be lectures, tutorials, talks, discussions and more. In Cambridge, we will visit colleges and other places of interest. Do join us.

Lecture list

Alison Hennegan, Women and Nature in Jacob’s Room (1922)
Karina Jakubowicz, The Artist’s Garden in To the Lighthouse (1927)
Kate Eliot, Land and Sea in The Waves (1931)
Trudi Tate, The Weather in History: The Years (1937)
Ellie Mitchell, Earth and Sky in Between the Acts (1941)

Plus talks

Ann Kennedy Smith on Woolf, Rupert Brooke and the ‘Neo-Pagans’
Harriet Baker on Nature writing in Virginia Woolf’s Asheham Diary
Bonnie Lander Johnson on Vanishing Landscapes: Saffron
Claudia Tobin on Monk’s House and Garden
… and more.

The course will run twice. First, live online, Thursday 9 to Monday 13 July 2026 (includes a weekend). Then in person in Cambridge, 2-7 August. And on Saturday 8 August, there is an optional trip to Monks House and Charleston.

Whether online or in Cambridge, the summer course is a wonderful experience, with outstanding lecturers, most of them current or recent members of the University of Cambridge.