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From the oval–shaped flower–bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart–shaped or tongue–shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface.
This is the opening sentence of the short story, providing a glimpse into one of the key functions of its setting, connecting the importance and dominance of its flowers with events that will unfold within and around them. The description of the flowers in this sentence emphasizes both their diversity and their numbers. That emphasis extends symbolically to draw attention to the diversity of people who visit the flowerbed. Shapes, including hearts and tongues, suggest the importance of the diverse emotions and conversations of the characters that will soon pass by, establishing an interpretive demand on readers: Woolf’s glimpses into the lives of the characters should be viewed as the flowers might be viewed—closely, with an eye on their underlying beauty. The narrative continues to expand on this emphasis, highlighting the interplay of colors in the light, dancing, blending, and altering perception. As the characters pass, pause, and view the scene, readers are to view them as if wonderfully lit by the colors of the scene, diverse and unique.
The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower–bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig–zag flights from bed to bed.
In this quote, Woolf continues to draw parallels between characters and aspects of the setting. She develops a direct connection between the butterflies and visitors to the garden, no longer focusing on perceptions of their beauty. Instead, the description of the butterflies establishes a theme hinting at a shared, rather than unique, quality of human nature and experience. The butterflies fly in a zig-zag manner, representing the irregularity and unpredictability of the lives and traits of the characters who will soon pass by. Those characters not only meander through the garden but through life as well. Simon and Eleanor, it will be revealed, each experience a single event that changes the course of their now shared lives. The elderly eccentric zigs and zags his way through a confusing conversation, and he is obviously unstable, incapable of maintaining a focused direction. Trissie and her partner, the status of their relationship unclear, face an apparently crucial moment in which “something loomed up,” yet readers will never know the outcome or what ultimately transpires. Woolf’s detail about the butterflies in the setting, as with her description of the flowers, emphasizes a point: the lives of the characters who wander by are unpredictable and, if anything, chaotic.
Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles.
As “Kew Gardens” draws toward its conclusion, characters and setting blend together, as if the two are indistinct from each other. Woolf’s description of the setting echoes her language at the story’s outset, focusing on color, wavering motion, and the effects of light. Here, under the heat of the day, however, people seek shade and disappear. Setting and characters merge into a single, unified perception in which only the voices of people remain. In Woolf’s description, those voices reflect ideas and events that surfaced earlier in the story. The voices break the silence abruptly with a profound sense of contentment, intense desire, or a refreshing surprise, as if the setting speaks for itself and provides a coda to explain the events unfolding for the characters: the mature contentment of Simon and Eleanor’s relationship, the passionate obsessions of the eccentric lonely old man , and the freshness of Trissie and her partner.
