Richard Shone on Leonard Woolf

The large garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex, bounded on one side by the village street, and on the other by gently sloping ground towards the River Ouse, was locally famous for its summer brilliance. In August — the month in which I paid my first visit — when most gardens have a moment of exhaustion, Leonard Woolf had contrived a quilt of dahlias, lilies, purple Jerusalem artichokes, gaillardias and fuchsias in the flowerbeds. A conservatory along the side of the house bristled with cacti. Woolf appeared from a distant corner, secateurs in hand, twine dangling from a jacket pocket, a dog fiercely kept to heel. I had been driven the few miles from Charleston by Duncan Grant, in his scarred green Morris Minor, to have tea with Leonard Woolf, on a hot afternoon in 1966. I was 17; the two gentlemen were sprightly octogenarians. Woolf’s greeting was a peremptory nod both to me whom he did not know and to Grant whom he had known for well over half a century.