Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

Born in 1892, Vita, the only child of Lord and Lady Sackville, was brought up in one of the largest houses in England, Knole, just outside Sevenoaks, twenty miles from Sissinghurst. She was passionate about Knole. With its picture-encrusted galleries, its vast attics and endless corridors, it was her solitary childhood playground and had a strong hold on her throughout her life.

  King Edward VII at a Knole house party in 1898.

  We have a photograph of a typical Knole house party, of 1898/9: Vita, then a little girl, is sitting at the front, with King Edward VII (sitting down to the left), her grandfather Lionel, Lord Sackville (standing in the centre), her mother Victoria seated to the left of the King, and her father – another Lionel – the dapper man standing right at the back behind her mother. Vita hated this Edwardian grandeur – her novel The Edwardians is about just that, how much she disliked this time – but she had a passion for its older underlayers – not the sheeny Edwardian pleasure house her mother loved and polished, but the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century romance of Knole, the way its grey stones seemed so deeply rooted in its park, its huge ramblingness and a kind of romantic unknowability.

  Vita, as a girl, with her father at Knole.

  Vita spent most of her childhood exploring the outer reaches of Knole. It was not the garden that interested her – which was a formal, Victorian, soulless place with lines of stick-like, heavily pruned Hybrid Perpetual roses and not much else – but the house and the beautiful rolling ancient park full of oak and walnut trees in which she could imagine Queen Elizabeth and Philip Sidney pursuing the deer. She was a tomboy, possessing her own khaki and armour, and had one or two friends from Sevenoaks that she treated like lieutenants and soldiers of her own toy army. In her teens she fell in love with a pretty young girl her own age called Rosamund Grosvenor, which was more a romantic friendship than a sexual affair.

  Vita in fancy dress in her early twenties.

  Vita lived at Knole until her marriage to Harold Nicolson – a brilliant and charming young diplomat – in the chapel there on 1 October 1913, when she was twenty-one and he five years older. Vita continued to stay there often when Harold was working away. Soon after their marriage, he was sent briefly to Constantinople. Vita joined him for his less than six-month posting. They returned to England in 1914, where their eldest son Ben was born, and lived mainly in Ebury Street in London, but in the spring of 1915 they decided to buy a house in the country too. They chose a fourteenth-century cottage, Long Barn, only two miles from Knole, so Vita could then easily visit almost every day.

  The wedding of Vita and Harold in the small private chapel at Knole, October 1913.

  Only in her twenties did her understanding of her own sexuality deepen into the full-blown and wildly subversive love affairs which she continued to have through her thirties and forties. The most significant was with Violet Trefusis – a smart society girl and novelist – that in the years after the First World War and the birth of their second son Nigel very nearly destroyed Vita’s marriage to Harold; but it was the experience which, having survived it, meant that Vita remained bonded to Harold for the rest of her life.

  Harold (left), Vita, Rosamund Grosvenor and Vita’s father, Lionel, in 1912.

  Both of them were chronically unfaithful to each other, he largely with upper-class young men, she with a series of beautiful young women writers; and in the 1920s with Virginia Woolf, for whom Vita represented a daring and threateningly adventurous plunge into a world of aristocratic fleshliness by which she was half attracted and half repulsed.

  Vita’s father died in 1928, but – as a woman – she could not inherit Knole. The house and estate passed to her Uncle Charlie and it became more difficult emotionally for her to go there. It was so close to Long Barn, where they had lived for fourteen years, and that was painful. On top of this, in 1929, Vita and Harold heard that the neighbouring farm had been sold and was to be developed with the addition of an intensive battery chicken farm. Neither of them liked the idea of this on their doorstep and both were keen to move.

  The poet Dorothy – or Dotty – Wellesley, one of Vita’s longstanding girlfriends, had heard of a house that might interest Vita from a friend, Mr Beale, a land agent from Tunbridge Wells. The estate agent’s particulars were mainly to do with Mr Neve’s Victorian farmhouse, but at the end referred to ‘picturesque ruins in grounds’. On 4 April 1930, Dotty drove Vita and Nigel to Sissinghurst to have a look.

  An aerial photograph of Sissinghurst in 1932. The architectural structure is much the same today – the garden by the Priest’s House has just been laid out (the new paths can be seen) but the north wall of the Top Courtyard has not yet been built.

  Vita gives a fictional version of arriving here in her novel Family History, when the heroine Evelyn Jarrold is first taken to the home of her lover, Miles. They are coming by car at night: ‘the lane widened, and the fan of light showed up a group of oast-houses beside a great tiled barn; then it swung round on a long, low range of buildings with a pointed arch between two gables. Miles drove under the arch and pulled up. It was very dark and cold. The hard winter starlight revealed an untidy courtyard, enclosed by ruined walls, and opposite, an arrowy tower springing up to a lovely height with glinting windows.’ At another moment in the novel she describes ‘how the sunshine enriched the old brick walls with a kind of patina that turned them pink’; and ‘there was a peace within those high brick walls’.

  A ‘snap’ of the Tower at Sissinghurst, as Vita found it in 1930.

  Within minutes of arriving Vita was ‘flat in love with Sissinghurst’. ‘The place, when I first saw it on a spring day … caught instantly at my heart and my imagination. I fell in love at first sight … It was Sleeping Beauty’s Garden: but a garden crying out for rescue.’ Standing in the middle of the vegetable patch looking up to the Tower, she turned to twelve-year-old Nigel and said, ‘I think we shall be happy in this place.’ He was much less sure, but there was no discouraging Vita, now set on the path of her long relationship with Sissinghurst.

  Tomato plants growing in the Top Courtyard in the 1920s. The entrance arch is still blocked (see photograph here)

  It fitted so well with her for many reasons. From the moment she arrived, she loved its general lack of smartness and its close relationship to the surrounding country. There was no ostentation – a dirty word – no pomposity, no lodge, no sweeping drive, no great gatehouse, just the few rough, decrepit buildings surrounded by her beloved Kentish Weald. She had great affection for the area around Sevenoaks: her childhood had been full of nutteries, apple and pear orchards and plenty of hop gardens, and Sissinghurst – not many miles away – felt just the same. All the more tempting, there was a nuttery included in the Sissinghurst site for sale.

  She loved Sissinghurst’s moat which, she said, ‘provided a black mirror of quiet water in the distance’, and its tower at the centre of the garden and visible from everywhere. Even as a child, Vita had dreamt of having her own tower, a solitary place in which she could write and reflect.

  She loved the romance of the ruin and its crumbliness, the walls inviting a garden to be made within them, a garden that was not invented, for Sissinghurst was a real place in need of redemption. Vita and Harold had between them made a good garden at Long Barn but were both now ready to create something more ambitious. Vita had learnt a lot about plants in the last ten or fifteen years, and about the style in which she wanted to garden. On the first page of a notebook from Long Barn in 1916, she had written, ‘when and how to plant lilac? When wild thyme? Wild sedums? What other good rock things, bushy? Good climbing roses.’ In the following years she tried and tested many plants and combinations, and they had both become passionate and knowledgeable gardeners.

  Vita never liked the brand-spanking-new, but rather things that had already clearly had a life, even if now slightly disintegrating (see the cushions on the bench in her bedroom here), and so this place – in its wrecked state – revealed itself more and more and by the minute as perfectio
n. She liked the echoes of grandeur that she found here rather than grandeur itself. It’s perfectly possible, walking through the garden today, to imagine those first few hours she spent here looking into all the hidden corners, exploring the damp buildings, seeing from the top of the Tower the way Sissinghurst was deeply embedded in its own landscape, and almost feel a catch in the throat, the feeling of ‘think what we could do here – we could make a poem of this place’.

  Sissinghurst when Vita and Harold arrived in 1930 – the view from the Tower looking towards the Elizabethan barn.

  When she researched the history, the bond tightened further. She found there had been a Knole and Sackville link with the people who had built Sissinghurst. Sir Richard Baker had a sister, Cicely, who was married to Thomas Sackville from Knole. Sir John Baker, Richard and Cicely’s father, who bought Sissinghurst in about 1530, was therefore Vita’s ancestor – her thirteenth great-grandfather – so there was even a genetic link between her family and this place she was now in. Lineage was one of Vita’s obsessions, so Sissinghurst seemed the perfect compensation for her loss of Knole. From very early on, she flew the Sackville flag and staked her ancestral claim. There was no doubt this was her place – it was her estate, the acres around which she could stride like any Sackville squire from the previous five or six centuries, woman or not. Harold never owned a stick or a blade of grass here. He recognised and in some ways celebrated her dominance. When she died Harold commissioned Reynolds Stone, the famous letterer, to carve a plaque: ‘Here lived V. Sackville-West who made this garden.’ There was no mention of him – not accurate, of course, as Harold was hugely important in the creation of the garden – but he made sure the point was strongly made.

  Vita and her Tower. It was topped by the Sackville-West flag from the moment they arrived.

  A series of photographs commissioned by Vita to illustrate Country Notes.

  The oast house with hop sacks.

  The hop garden.

  The arch of the Elizabethan barn, looking southwards to the six kiln oast house.

  A Sissinghurst gate: push the top bar and the rest folds.

  The die was cast: the person and the place had found – and would restore – each other. On 4 April, Harold wrote in his diary: ‘Vita telephones to say she has seen the ideal house – a place in Kent near Cranbrook.’ On 5 April, the day after Vita saw it, Ben and Harold took the train down to Staplehurst to visit Sissinghurst, and on the 6th Vita and Harold went back again. Harold wrote in his diary, ‘We walk round the fields to the brook and round by the wood. We come suddenly upon a nut walk and that settles it.’

  Harold then wavered. In his entry for 13 April, a wet day on which they’d visited again, he writes, ‘it all looks big broken down and sodden’, and he tried to be momentarily sensible and say they could not afford it. He wrote to Vita on the 24th – half joking – that it was too expensive and needed too much done to make it habitable; and that ‘for the £30,000 it would end up costing [equivalent to perhaps £3 million today], we could buy a beautiful place replete with park, garage, h and c, central heating, historical association, and two lodges r and l’. But he knew that Vita and Sissinghurst were now an inevitable partnership and he too rapidly fell for its charms. He says in the same letter, ‘let’s go ahead and buy it’. On 6 May 1930 her offer was accepted and she bought it with the adjoining Victorian farmhouse and the five-hundred-acre farm.

  Their friends and children – to start with – thought they were crazy. As their friend the writer Raymond Mortimer wrote, ‘we all thought Sissinghurst a gloomy place in hideous flat country, with commonplace cottages and no view and couldn’t think why they wanted it’. Mortimer – like the boys – loved his comfy weekends at Long Barn and was bemused, but Vita and Harold were raring to go.

  A charcoal drawing by Carolus-Duran of Vita, aged fourteen, at Knole in July 1906.

  As she says in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’, written in 1931 and dedicated to Virginia Woolf:

  A tired swimmer in the waves of time

  I throw my hands up: let the surface close:

  Sink down through centuries to another clime,

  And buried find the castle and the rose.

  Buried in time and sleep,

  So drowsy, overgrown,

  That here the moss is green upon the stone,

  And lichen stains the keep.

  Here, tall and damask as a summer flower,

  Rise the brick gable and the springing tower;

  Invading Nature crawls

  With ivied fingers over rosy walls …

  Wherein I find in chain

  The castle, and the pasture, and the rose.

  Vita had found a place in which they – and particularly she – would feel intensely at home. It was a forgotten place: its past, the sense all around her of the Elizabethan buildings; its present, the farm; and the garden she would make in it – its future.

  Harold on his first-ever visit in spring 1930 – the entrance arch was blocked and the place was derelict.

  3

  SISSINGHURST’S DESIGN

  Harold at the time he and Vita arrived at Sissinghurst.

  It’s well known that the garden at Sissinghurst was the joint creation of Vita and Harold. He had a genius for structural design, making a series of axial vistas and enclosed ‘rooms’ that fitted both expertly within the site they had found, and together as a geometrically divided whole. Vita then filled those rooms with her own particular planting style.

  They bought Sissinghurst as much for the possibility of making a garden in its Elizabethan ruins as for its being a house in which they could live. A conventional house – with living, eating and sleeping all under the same roof – was not one of their priorities. Vita and Harold had previously had the idea of living at Bodiam Castle, which had been on the market in 1925; their vision of life there involved each of them living in one of the turrets, one for Vita, one for Harold and one for each of their sons, Ben and Nigel. The four of them could occasionally meet in the open courtyard in the middle.

  This is hardly what most of us think of as the basis for family life – the children were fourteen and twelve in 1930 – but the idea suited them and Sissinghurst fitted this vision well. Once installed there, Harold spent the weekdays in London and the boys were away at school, but when everyone was there, the arrangement would allow for privacy and work and they could all just meet each other for meals, a garden linking each building into a home. They had the perfect empty canvas. Of all the gardens I’ve seen, only Ninfa, about forty miles southeast of Rome – a garden also created in a ruin (and with a broad limestone stream running through its heart) – comes anywhere near.

  I can imagine them there through the first summer, a huge and brilliant mutual project in front of them. As we know from Portrait of a Marriage, Vita and Harold had been through hair-raising times, but making a home here, creating some rooms and a garden, was something they could do together when their other work commitments – both their writing and Harold’s political life – allowed. We all know how mutually bonding it is having a project on even a fraction of this daunting scale. They did not have enough money – at least, not until Vita’s mother Victoria died in 1936 – but that was not going to hold them back, and within weeks they launched into the project with great gusto.

  The plotting and planning of the garden started straight away. Harold drew up avenues and viewpoints, criss-crossing the ruined site. He was a descendant of Robert Adam, and proud of it, and was always in charge of the architectural improvements and the design of both their gardens. As Vita said in 1953, ‘I could never have done it myself. Fortunately I had, through marriage, the ideal collaborator. Harold Nicolson should have been a garden-architect in another life. He has a natural taste for symmetry, and an ingenuity for forcing focal points or long-distance views where everything seemed against him, a capacity I totally lacked.’

  He had had a practice run at Long Barn and was helped there in sketching the plan for
the Dutch garden by Edwin Lutyens – a friend of Vita’s mother – who came to visit for a day. Harold was clear what sort of garden he was going to lay out at Sissinghurst. His overall scheme for any garden design was this: ‘The main axis of a garden should be indicated and indeed emphasized, by rectilinear perspectives, by lines of clipped hedges ending in terminals in the form of statues or stone benches. Opening from the main axis there should be small enclosed gardens, often constructed round a central pool, and containing some special species or variety of plant.’

  Harold was as obsessed as Vita with their plans. They discussed what they both wanted. She confirms his vision as her vision in an article in 1953 in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘a combination of long axial walks running north and south, east and west, usually with terminal points such as a statue or an archway, or a pair of sentinel poplars and the more intimate surprise of small geometrical gardens opening off them, rather as the rooms of an enormous house would open off the arterial corridors. There should be the strictest formality of design, with the maximum informality in planting.’ The Sissinghurst garden would be like a house, but a house on the Knole scale. Just like moving from the library at Knole to the drawing room and into the Colonnade, that’s how Sissinghurst’s garden rooms were conceived – rooms opening off arterial corridors.

  The new garden was naturally confined within the limits of the moat to the north and east side, and the front range of dilapidated buildings to the west. The third arm of the moat, in its Elizabethan heyday had at some point been filled in, probably in the sixteenth century, to make a garden wall. That was the beauty of the place – it was so obvious where it should begin and end, confined by its Elizabethan history. Harold used the inherited walls wherever he could, adding hedges and three new walls. In 1935 the north wall of the Top Courtyard was built. He also added a wall to divide the Priest’s House garden from the Tower Lawn and at its centre included the arched Bishop’s Gate with a plaque depicting three bishops. They had brought this marble back from their time in Constantinople, and Harold had it inserted in the brickwork. The final new wall, a very tall, straight line with a large semicircular niche at its centre, was built in the would-be Rose Garden. It was designed by the well-known restoration architect Albert Powys, and Vita in particular hated it from the start – too tall, the wrong brick, over-pointed, and too formal and smart to fit at Sissinghurst. That apart, the new walls added hugely to the garden’s all-important sense of division and enclosure.