To Read & To Write

As this is the only book by Virginia Woolf that I've read thus far (I'm a bit ashamed of that; but I'll catch up!) I'm not sure how I can compare this work to her oeuvre. But I can say that "Kew Gardens" is a gorgeously strange book that is the length of a children's picture book. It takes place in England's real Kew Gardens: a botanical garden that holds the most diverse plant life in the world and which still stands today.  Woolf writes in prose, using her eyes to describe flower beds, leaves, stalks, snails, and the people who walk amongst them. Her words are written in exquisite imaginative detail, as if she were looking through an enchanted magnifying glass, allowing her to hear the desires of the flowers and other plant-life and the inner thoughts of their visitors. Woolf records fictional conversations of the inhabitants, such as inner ruminations of their past in tandem with their almost paranoiac response to the garden that surrounds ...