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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
Sissinghurst Since the Sixteenth Century
PART 1: THE PEOPLE AND THE PLACE
1. A Brief History
2. Finding the Dream
3. Sissinghurst’s Design
PART 2: VITA’S GARDEN THEMES
4. A Mixture of All Things
5. A Sophisticated Palette
6. Cram, Cram, Cram
7. Flowering Shrubs
8. Scents
PART 3: THE SMALLER CANVAS
9. Painterly Plants
10. Indoor and Container Gardening
11. Cut Flowers
12. The Recent Past
Photographs
Sources
Picture Credits and Colour Picture Captions
Index of Plants, Shrubs and Trees
Copyright
Harold and Vita standing in front of the fireplace in the newly restored South Cottage in the early 1930s.
INTRODUCTION
Gardens do not normally survive their creators, but Sissinghurst remains one of the most heart-rendingly beautiful spectacles in England. It’s a garden in a romantic place, a ruined Elizabethan hunting palace flanked on two sides by a moat, in the pretty wooded part of the Kentish Weald. Enveloped in its own orchards and cornfields, it’s full of intimacies and, in summer, what its creator called ‘the dark blue and gold’ of long views to distant hills. The combination of the buildings, the walls, and the planting around and within them has an extraordinary effect. There is very little else like it in the world for abundance and fullness: its fountains of roses, voluptuous, delicious-smelling, out-of-control geysers of flowers; the Purple Border, the White Garden, the Cottage Garden, all set within the terracotta brick frame. It is one of the twentieth century’s greatest creations, made eighty years ago in the course of about a decade by the writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband, the diplomat-cum-politician and writer, Harold Nicolson.
I remember my first sight of Sissinghurst when, just under thirty years ago, I was invited to a party on a Bank Holiday Monday, when the garden used to be closed. I was living in west London and, unusually for someone in their mid-twenties, I was already keen on gardening. I was training to be a doctor in the white-coat sterility of the Charing Cross Hospital wards, but I came from a plant-loving family and to keep me sane, I’d started to grow things in my own back garden.
The party was held on a lovely sunny day in May, and I was excited to see this famous garden. I had not expected the beauty of the buildings. People had talked about the garden, but not the place, which as you approach from the narrow lane feels more French than English, more like a small village than someone’s home. And it all felt endearingly crooked, built from small, ancient bricks, and with an air of slight crumbliness at every corner.
I could hear the whole party out on the top lawn. I went in slowly, noticing the bronze urns at the front, full of a blue-grey pansy with large, flat, cheery flowers, ones I associated more with a Hyde Park bedding scheme than with these grand, sombre pots at the entrance to Sissinghurst. Their colour almost matched that of a large clutch of rosemary bushes with particularly dark blue flowers (Sissinghurst’s own hybrid, see here) to their right and left, and the hanging bells of a small straggly vine of Clematis alpina, breaking the line of the arch overhead. This was the beginning of my exposure to Sissinghurst’s painterly combinations – that blue, a genius contrast to the colour of the Elizabethan and Tudor bricks, is for ever seared into my mind.
The garden was by then – in the early 1980s – owned by the National Trust. Nigel, Vita and Harold’s son, had given it to the Trust in 1967 in lieu of his mother’s death duties, so that he could be sure their creation would be preserved in perpetuity. Pam Schwerdt and Sybille Kreutzberger had been the head gardeners from a couple of years before Vita’s death in 1962 and they’d been taking care of and raising the horticultural level of the garden for the twenty-five-odd years since.
Adam and me, early on an April morning in the Spring Garden.
And now I’ve had the joy of living in this wonderful place. A few years after first seeing the garden I married Adam, grandson of Vita and Harold, and when his father Nigel became ill and died in 2004, we moved to Sissinghurst. No longer a doctor and now with two children, I had become a gardener, and as someone passionately interested in the beauty of what’s around me, I’m lucky to have spent ten years of my life entwined with Vita and Sissinghurst. Her interiors, the rooms she made, are as rich, as stimulating and excitingly put together as her garden. In the morning I wake up in a bed brought by her from Knole, her nearby family home; I am surrounded by Chinese turquoise ceramic animals that belonged to Vita’s mother. The light coming in from all three windows in our room radiates through amber flasks on the window ledges, which in Vita’s childhood had stood in a window at Knole. There is the scent, on a spring morning, of the huge osmanthus trained on the wall below the windows – one of Vita’s favourite plants (see here), and as this fades it’s replaced by the spicy fragrance of wisteria and the sweet smell of the rose ‘Blossomtime’, a variety loved by Vita for its good mildew resistance, frothy pink flowers and long season, with buds still covering it right into autumn.
I plunged into her books and the more I learnt about Vita, the more excited I felt. I loved her taste, her habit of covering tables with Persian carpets as well as having them on the floor, her lustrous deep-green china egg hanging in front of our huge open fire to avert the evil eye, the turquoise Chinese lamps, the Duncan Grant painted box next to the Roman alabaster funeral urn in the middle of the chunky oak table, almost black with age. And all this before I’d walked out into the garden, with its powerful colours and textures ‘rich as a fig broken open, soft as a ripened peach, flecked as an apricot, coral as a pomegranate, bloomy as a bunch of grapes’, as she described her favourite varieties of old-fashioned rose.
A typical Vita interior – the Brew House, which she used as her workroom during the war. It’s filled with many of her favourite things: a tapestry chair, a bronze hand on the high window ledge and a huge bowl of carved wooden fruit from a Mexican market.
My husband Adam became increasingly fired up by the idea of trying to enrich the whole Sissinghurst landscape. As he started to explore its history and all the related documents for the book he published in 2008, Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History, so our lives steadily filled with all the stories of what Sissinghurst had been in the past and during his own childhood. As time went on, I too increasingly revelled in Vita’s writing and in the black and white photographs we have of Sissinghurst in Vita and Harold’s day. Vita’s words and those photographs show an exuberant place – a garden brimming and overflowing. As Vita says of herself, ‘My liking for gardens to be lavish is an inherent part of my garden philosophy. I like generosity wherever I find it, whether in gardens or elsewhere. I hate to see things scrimp and scrubby.’ ‘Always exaggerate rather than stint,’ she says later, ‘masses are more effective than mingies.’ Nothing was to be too tidy. ‘Too severe a formality is almost as repellant as lack of any.’ This was to garden in the maximalist, not minimalist, way.
For fifteen years, from the autumn of 1946 to 1961, in her workroom in the Elizabethan tower which presides over the whole of Sissinghurst, Vita wrote a gardening column for the Observer, mostly about plants – new and old – writing as
if they were her friends with all their charm and idiosyncrasy. She didn’t include much about her own garden, at least overtly, but everything she wrote in fact relates to Sissinghurst. She also contributed the odd foreword or introduction to gardening books of friends and some articles for Country Life and the Royal Horticultural Society magazine. This book draws on all these sources, as well as on her garden notebooks and the letters Harold and Vita wrote to each other after they moved here in 1930. Together they add up to a brilliantly vivid portrait of Vita’s Sissinghurst.
In her four bound collections – In Your Garden, In Your Garden Again, More for Your Garden and Even More for Your Garden, which basically comprised her Observer articles with a few extras added, Vita organised her material month by month. I’ve used a different system, arranged according to the different themes in her gardening at Sissinghurst so that we might use them in thinking about our own gardens. I have started with a brief history – the parts relevant to Vita’s obsession with Sissinghurst – followed by the story of how she and Harold found it, and the love affair between the place and the people. Then I move on to Harold’s structuring of the garden, the skeletal design; then Vita’s broad-brushstroke ideas for how to make it truly enveloping without too much maintenance; and on again into the finer detail – her favourite plants, which work on a more intimate scale.
There’s lots of discussion here about flowers for cutting because Vita loved having an endless succession of small arrangements to scatter through her indoor life; and she gives advice for potted plants, interesting things to have on your desk or window ledge, particularly in the grey and wet of winter and early spring when the weather doesn’t tempt you outside. There’s practical information here too – for instance, growing lilies from seed (see here) and how best to care for roses (see here and here). The last section of the book brings the history up to date, telling what has happened at Sissinghurst with Vita and Harold no longer there.
You might think that the garden writing of a woman in the 1930s, 40s and 50s would have little relevance now, that her aesthetic would not work today, that fashions would have changed too much, that garden design and the plants available would have moved on too far, but none of that is true. It is rousing and inspiring to go back and look at and read again about how she did things and what she thought, the plants she did and didn’t choose.
The Big Room at Sissinghurst, created from the stables and designed for entertaining, which, in fact, they rarely did. This looks almost exactly the same now as it did when this photograph was taken in the 1950s.
Luckily for us, Vita is a chatty writer, light on her feet. From the moment I started reading her pieces, they became my favourite source of garden inspiration, for dipping into before I fell asleep or for reading in a great batch in one sitting.
Vita has strong loves and hates and she has a great turn of phrase. One of her favourite plants is the gentian sino-ornata, its brilliance of colour ‘like the very best bit of blue sky landing by parachute on earth’; another is eremurus – the glorious foxtail lily, which looks ‘like a cathedral spire flushed warm in the sunset’.
There are things she doesn’t like such as privet and laurel, which are ‘dark, dank, dusty and dull – how deadly dull’, and standard roses – ‘top-heavy with their great blooms on one thin leg like a crane’ – and the month of August, ‘this dull time, this heavy time, when everything has lost its youth and is overgrown and mature’. Furthermore, she ‘hates, hates, hates’ the rose ‘American Pillar and her sweetly pink companion Perkins’ (‘Dorothy Perkins’), ‘which should be forever abolished from our gardens’.
She is accurate and sometimes funny in her descriptions. How true it is – now she’s pointed it out – that the ‘Silky-silvery seed-heads’ of clematis ‘remind me of Yorkshire terriers curled up in a ball’; that the flowers of Magnolia grandiflora look like ‘great white pigeons settling among dark leaves’; the spikes of big gladiolus hybrids ‘in those great peacock-tail displays look like swords dipped in all the hues of sunrise, sunset and storm’; and that we should all grow joke plants like the ‘humble plant’, Mimosa pudica, which collapses as if dead when you stroke it, only to jump up again when you turn your back. What Vita said about gardens and plants over half a century ago is just as true now, and it’s hard to find it better said.
Vita and Harold filled a stack of leather-bound albums with pictures of the garden as it evolved. This was before and after the war, helped by Jack Vass and his team of gardeners. Sissinghurst became famous quite quickly, the garden drawing many distinguished and talented people who wanted to see it at first hand, and some of the best photographs come from them. There are images by wonderful photographers such as A. E. Henson and Edwin Smith, who took the picture of her desk (see here): still messy, covered in scraps of paper, notes, stamps, matches for her cigarettes, five little vases of flowers – the life of a woman still full of curiosity and adventure just a few weeks before she died. To this collection I’ve added up-to-date images of Sissinghurst at its best, and some new ones by two American friends, Stephen Orr and Ngoc Minh Ngo, and also by Jonathan Buckley, the photographer I have worked with on my books for years.
Vita’s Tower, looking from the Orchard, photographed in May.
Fifty years after Vita’s death, I wanted to collect together a sort of scrapbook of her garden writing, to tell the story of Sissinghurst in her own words, alongside this collection of photographs – many of which have never been seen – to re-create between these covers something of the garden she made.
SISSINGHURST SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
1530
Sir John Baker buys Sissinghurst
1560s
Richard Baker builds the hunting palace
1573
Elizabeth I stays at Sissinghurst
Richard Baker knighted
1756–63
French prisoners housed at Sissinghurst
1770s
Possible date of major fire
1796
Sissinghurst let to Cranbrook parish
1855
Let to George Neve
1892
Vita Sackville-West born
1903
Sold to the Cheeseman family
1926
Sold to the Wilmshurst family
1928
Put on the market again
1930
7 May: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson buy Sissinghurst. The design of the garden starts immediately. Two gardeners – George Hayter and son – plus Mr Copper, the handyman, help out Start to restore the upper lake to the south of the garden straight away
December: Dam the nearby Hammer stream to make the lower lake (costing £125) – mainly Harold’s project
1931
Finish the lake
Clear the whole garden of rubbish
Start putting in lots of hedge plants
Vita writes poem ‘Sissinghurst’, dedicated to Virginia Woolf (see here)
1932
Vita and Harold let Long Barn and move into Sissinghurst full time
1934
Plant six hundred Lilium regale
1935
Harold elected MP for Leicester West
1936
Victoria (Vita’s mother) dies, so they have more money for the house and garden
Another gardener, Mr Farley, is taken on
1938
First opening for National Gardens Scheme – only two days a year
1939
Jack Vass taken on as head gardener, but leaves to join the RAF in 1941
During Second World War the Tower top serves as an observation point for the Observer Corps (spotting and reporting German air raids) and Vita moves to a study in the Brew House in the front range
1940
Garden open daily – Vita likes it, Harold does not
1946
Jack Vass returns and stays until 1957
1957–9
Ronald Platt becomes head
gardener
1959
Pam Schwerdt and Sybille Kreutzberger become head gardeners
1962
2 June: Vita’s death
1967
National Trust takes over
1968
1 May: Harold’s death
1991
Sarah Cook becomes head gardener
2004
Alexis (Lex) Datta becomes head gardener
23 September: death of Nigel Nicolson
2013
Troy Scott Smith becomes head gardener
Part 1
THE PEOPLE AND THE PLACE
The map of the house and garden from a drawing by Harold; it was included in the first guide book, immediately after the war.
1
A BRIEF HISTORY
At night, our part of Sissinghurst – the southern arm of the front range – looks like a liner, only one room wide, with windows on both sides looking out east and west. It’s long and narrow, and studded over its three floors with those small windows glowing with light. Five years ago the American garden-writer and photographer Stephen Orr came to stay for the night. He was over from New York for the Chelsea Flower Show and I put him up in what we call Juliet’s – Adam’s sister – room, the southernmost room on the attic floor.
Sissinghurst Page 1