In Avrom Fleisham's early (1975) monograph on Virginia Woolf (a book which repays re–reading) he describes Woolf 's practice of what he calls, after Northrop Frye, an “encyclopedic” modernist style dependent on a vast network of allusions (xi), and quotes William Empson's plaint “If only there was an index, showing what had been compared with what” (ix). As the daughter of a biologist, I am naturally drawn to large taxonomic schemas, and so in this paper what I am going to try to do is provide something of a botanical encyclopedia/index to plant references in Woolf 's fiction and some of her nonfiction, correlating these published and shaped references as much as possible to mentions of actual plants in her diaries and letters. For this talk I will focus in particular on flowers, though of course flowers do inevitably turn into fruit, and trees also often burst into flower, so rigid categories are not always possible. When I first set out to locate and record all these plant references (some five years ago), I began by simply counting and making lists. But after a while, I began to realize I needed to make some further distinctions. Flowers (and plants in general) appear in at least three different registers in Woolf 's work: as literal natural organisms, as artificial renderings of the natural, and as figurative strategies. My statistical flower counts don't make these distinctions, but my subsequent analysis does.

I'd like to begin with some general, overall discoveries, including a grounding in Woolf 's sources of knowledge about flowers and the plant world in general. Then I will proceed to talk through the use of flowers in more or less chronological order, starting with the diaries and moving from novel to novel. I will end by showing you a design for a potential Virginia Woolf Garden, an idealized rendering of a garden space incorporating the plants she mentions most often. (See Fig. 2).

I suspect we all have the sense that there are a lot of flowers in Woolf's work and that generally speaking they probably mean something.