Kew Gardens Benito Tubo Gonzlez The story opens with the description of the flora in Kew Gardens.

Kew Gardens are extensive gardens with botanical glasshouses located in the southwest of London. So the setting of this story is London, and it takes place between the years 1914 to 1918. This is assumed by the reader when a character mentions the war. Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder. Those were extremely dark and pessimistic times for Europeans, but the start of the story is clearly an optimistic one. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. The beam of light is usually seen as a symbol of optimism; it could even be compared to a godly light which shines from heaven to the earth. Again, as in The Mark on the Wall, we find the symbol of the snail. A creature whose shell resembles the continuity of life and the chaos it holds. A snails shell has the form of a spiral, which is a figure that emanates from a central point and one never knows where it could end. It is also chaotic because when a person looks into a spiral it holds the capability to hypnotise the viewer. In the opening of the story Woolf focuses on the description of the fauna and flora of a spot in Kew Gardens in which nature is given human characteristics. [] and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. The opposite also occurs and human beings are linked to nature. The desires of the first character in the story are linked to a dragonfly. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say Yes at once. Human beings also have nature characteristics. The old man in the story behaves like a carriage horse. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless.

The fact that nature and the human world can be connected by defining one with elements from the other is proof that there is no kind of hierarchy in the text. Things which we can feel are unimportant like flowers or a simple snail are at the same level as matters we are more concerned with like love, the passing of time or money. The flower bed is like a window, and from there we are witnesses of the human world around it. Although the human world and nature share some characteristics they are really opposites. Different groups of people pass next to the garden patch and we realize that the beauty of nature is irrelevant to them. They are preoccupied by their own private matters, and at the same time those concerns are of no importance to the natural world. Human preoccupations are compared to the snails journey. The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. The snails struggle to reach his goal, although important to the snail, may seem pointless to a human being. This is ironic because the matters that concern human beings are just as important as the snails. Human beings struggles are just as pointless as those of the snail.