Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  The Rondel, surrounded by the Rose Garden – displaying the contrast between the formal structure and lush abundance.

  He had had a previous go at this idea – under the influence of Hidcote Manor’s garden – at Long Barn, aiming to enclose each space in high hedges to give an element of surprise, each garden having an individual feel and peaking in a different season, yet melding into the overall feel.

  Miniature box plants, just put into the Lower Courtyard, spring 1931.

  At Sissinghurst, the paths were laid in the Cottage and Priest’s House Gardens in 1931, and then the yew hedge between what was the vegetable garden and Cottage Garden was planted the next year. The central path of the Kitchen Garden was laid and box hedges put in there in 1933 as well as the to-be-monumental yew Rondel. In 1934 the yew hedges of the Herb Garden were also planted, but the garden was not made here till after the war.

  Harold had finished the major plantings of trees and shrubs in six years, and everything then just needed to grow. In 1948, with the garden now mature, he stood back and assessed it – and whether they’d achieved what they wanted: ‘Sissinghurst has a quality of mellowness, of retirement, of un-flaunting dignity, which is just what we wanted to achieve … I think it is mainly due to the succession of privacies: the forecourt, the first arch, the main court, the tower arch, the lawn, the orchard. All a series of escapes from the world, giving the impression of cumulative escape.’ On the overall scheme Vita and Harold almost always agreed, but there was the odd tension between them and inevitably some disagreements. Sometimes her plants got in his way, and he was occasionally irritated by her romantic love for an incongruous tree or shrub which did not fit with his more austere design. When laying out the central path and the Rondel in the old kitchen garden, ‘Vita refuses to abide by our decision or to remove the miserable little trees which stand in the way of my design,’ reads Harold’s diary entry for 27 September 1933. ‘The romantic temperament as usual obstructing the classic.’

  Vita planting climbers on the Lower Courtyard walls in 1932.

  Harold also had a grander eye, more showy ambitions than Vita, who favoured the simple. Harold was keen on the idea of – and commissioned their architect Albert Powys to design – a covered loggia instead of the present wall at the north end of the Top Courtyard, and at one moment he even suggested niches along it for busts they’d had made of their friends. The levels of the Top Courtyard were difficult too, and when they were laying it out Harold suggested a nine-foot-wide terrace all the way along the top in front of the entrance range and with steps down to the lawn. Vita disagreed, arguing that a simple path of stone and then a sweep of green – reminiscent of the Green Court at Knole – were more fitting for the space.

  In both cases Vita won. The Top Courtyard has a wonderful scale about it and a calm, better for its simplicity. As Jane Brown says about Sissinghurst, ‘It has no long grass walks flanked by double borders, no pergola, no pools or fountains, no trellis walks or arbours and no topiary twists or triangles. There are no white-painted seats, no Versailles tubs … no balustraded terrace or columned temple’ as there were in so many other gardens at the time, part of the English classical revival; and this lack of ostentation, fiercely defended by Vita, is fundamental to its charm.

  It’s worth remembering that the set idea of how Vita and Harold divided their roles in the garden – Harold on structure and Vita on plants – doesn’t allow room for the fact that Vita consulted Harold continually on planting, particularly in the earlier days, and that Harold was in charge of one of the most intensely planted areas at Sissinghurst, the Lime Walk.

  You can see this team decision-making in a letter about the Long Barn garden in 1926 when Vita wanted to plant rhododendrons. ‘I don’t mind them in a big place round a lake,’ Harold said. ‘But I think they are as out of place at the cottage as a billiard table would be. I don’t like putting in big things (as distinct from small flowers) – which are not indigenous; I am opposed to specimen trees.’ He suggested cobnuts for the space instead of rhododendrons, with holly as the background. He wanted the garden there – and even more at Sissinghurst – to blend with the Kentish scene, and was a steady influence on Vita to achieve that end. There was a continual crossing over of ideas.

  The Spring Garden (or Lime Walk), the avenue of pleached limes underplanted with spring flowers, is the most formal planting at Sissinghurst; as Anne Scott-James says, ‘It is mathematically planned like a French garden.’ Its flavour is a little different from the rest, but it’s important to remember this was exclusively Harold’s garden, and from 1933 he had his own gardener, Sidney Neve. Harold planned the planting carefully in the winter months, and we have the fabulously detailed planting plans from which he worked. Nigel reported that his father did nearly all the bulb planting there himself, and his diary has endless entries such as ‘weeded Spring Garden’. This was his decompression chamber on his weekends away from work and from London, and he remained devoted to it all his life.

  The garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith makes the point that at Sissinghurst, more than any other garden, the design reflected the two makers: the mix of formal with the odd surprise, the private verging on the reclusive, the straight lines softened by the flamboyant and the exaggerated; and the barely pruned roses equivalent to Vita’s often eccentric garb – her black cloak and sombrero, for instance – next to the precision of the Lime Walk, based as it was on inch-by-inch maps and analysis.

  All our gardens tend to do this, but you can read Vita and Harold and their marriage like a book from the photographs of the garden taken in the ten years or so before Vita’s death, when they felt it was at its best. The garden at Sissinghurst belonged to both of them and its beauty is a friendly jostling of their skills and powers, a hybrid of precision and effusion – and the stronger for it.

  Within five years of Vita and Harold’s arrival, the garden’s structure – its main trees and hedges – was in place. As time went on Vita’s role became more important and Harold’s receded. It’s to Vita’s planting that we now turn.

  Part 2

  VITA’S GARDEN THEMES

  Sissinghurst at dawn, looking out of Juliet’s bedroom window on the top floor of the south wing of the front range.

  4

  A MIXTURE OF ALL THINGS

  Vita had done a little rose and shrub planting in their first three years, but from 1934 she really began to pack the garden in her characteristically exuberant way. What had begun in the first couple of years as a few random favourites going in – such as the white rose ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, planted on the South Cottage, and Magnolia grandiflora in the Top Courtyard – grew into large-scale planting, with massive orders such as six hundred Lilium regale bulbs put in in that one year, plus a huge shrub order from Hillier’s nurseries – magnolias, prunus, viburnums, daphnes, sweet bay and lots of shrub roses.

  She was mainly a plants person, someone who loved and wrote about individual varieties and new discoveries. But before she could get into that level of detail, she had to translate the vision she had for this place into the reality and come up with some sort of overall planting scheme. Vita seldom wrote about design, and if she did, would often just slip it in at the beginning or end of an article – very definitive, very sure that there was only one way of doing things. But it’s these themes, her style characteristics, her ideas for how to fill a garden, which define her as an individual gardener who had a lasting influence on English garden design.

  There are several themes that are prominent, some more startling in the photographs of the garden from the 1940s or 50s than they are today: she liked a full range of plants all mixed up in the borders together, as you’d see in a cottage garden, rather than the smart gardens of her day; she had a sophisticated take on colour which led her to make her three gardens – the White Garden, the Purple Border and the sunset-coloured Cottage Garden – within a narrow colour range; she liked every inch of each bed, every corner and every surface of her garde
n to be abundant and luxuriant. She was a big fan of the flowering shrub, low maintenance, easy plants with a substantial presence, to give the beds valuable architecture; and she loved scent, strong and delicious garden perfumes, right through the year. It’s these themes, within its clever classical design, which make Sissinghurst the work of art it is.

  * * *

  In many ways the planting Vita did at Sissinghurst was similar to her garden writing. In her columns she deliberately plays a game, dropping a thread of glamorous or exotic poetry, or a reference to the classics or to Milton, and then immediately afterwards comes straight down to the mundane – good growing tips, how to propagate, even how to make a concrete path look like stone.

  If you look at her gardening pieces, she often launches into a great thing, a grand idea – then collapses it with a joke or something she hates, or a piece of practicality (see her passages on Coronilla glauca (here), myrtle (here) and Rosa filipes ‘Kiftsgate’ (here)). Here’s the good writer in a relaxed frame of mind, her style ranging from the poetic to the everyday, whisking up and down the octaves, never sticking safely to the stalwart middle range. It’s that breadth and fusion that makes her writing so good and rich to read, repaying a visit again and again.

  You’ll also see this writing style in her garden. Her particular combination of qualities means that she achieves an atmosphere of great confidence – there’s nothing tentative or anxious, but a full-on going-for-it engagement with the place. The garden is jam-packed with a mix of very different sorts of plants, normally kept well apart in the gardens of her day – and that’s enlivening: high style, low style, big, delicate, careless and careful, all together.

  Vita loved a riotous jumble, as you’d see in a good cottage garden, but she wanted a bit more structure than that. So she turned to William Robinson, ‘who did more to alter the fashions of English gardening than any man of his time’. The now very elderly garden designer had been experimenting in his own garden at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex since the 1880s.

  Vita in her twenties.

  The Edwardian gardens she’d been brought up with – at Knole, and the country houses she visited as a young woman – had long herbaceous beds, tiered from the front to the back, or carpet bedding: ‘flower-garden planting made up of a few kinds of flowers which people were proud to put out in thousands and tens of thousands’ in a highly ordered and structured way, as Vita wrote, quoting Robinson, in her collection of articles, Country Notes, published in 1939. Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne in Kent gave his gardener a full set of Asprey’s enamelled cigarette boxes and asked him to model the borders on them – ‘designs which may be quite all right on the surface of a carpet but not on the surface of the much enduring earth’, Vita commented.

  ‘There was hardly a country seat that was not marred by the idea of a garden as a conventional and patterned thing,’ William Robinson wrote in 1883, Vita adding that ‘the beds were regularly filled year after year with scarlet geraniums, pink begonias, discordant salvias, yellow calceolarias and greenhouse plants with variegated foliage. Nothing more hideous, unsuitable or unnatural could be imagined.’

  Instinctively Vita knew that was not her thing. ‘I have no great love for herbaceous borders or for the plants that usually fill them – coarse things with no delicacy or quality about them. I think the only justification for such borders is that they shall be perfectly planned, both in regard to colour and to grouping; perfectly staked; and perfectly weeded. How many people have the time or the labour?’

  As Robinson wrote in The English Flower Garden, ‘formality is often essential to the plan of a garden, but never to the arrangement of its flowers or shrubs’.

  Victoria, Vita’s mother, in her formal ‘unnatural’ rose garden at Knole, typical of gardens at that time.

  Vita’s planting at Sissinghurst in the 1950s.

  ‘The real originality of Mr Robinsons’s methods lay in his choice of what to grow and how to grow it,’ Vita writes in Country Notes. In The English Flower Garden and The Wild Garden, both books read by Vita, Robinson moved away from swathes of bedding annuals and perennials to the idea of ‘shrubs, pinks and pansies’ all in together. He was inspired by ‘the happy-go-lucky gardens of the poor cottagers, where no elaborate schemes had been adopted and flowers had been left to grow for themselves in a happy tangle’.

  He went on to mix up all sorts of things together. Vita wrote: ‘In his own square beds … where he grew principally roses, he also grew clematis, whose purple clusters rose above low shrubs of silvery grey, and furthermore he covered the ground with pansies and even with low rock-plants, horrifying the rosarian whose conception of a rose garden had been one of savagely pruned bushes of uniform height, with bare ground in between.’ As Anne Scott-James says, he ‘commended such garden ideas as straight lines; blossoming hedges (roses, sweet briar, honeysuckle); creepers and ramblers on a house to clothe the fabric; roses, not trained as standards but well grouped and underplanted; the loose planting of shrubs in a border; borders crammed with successions of hardy flowers and bulbs; cottage gardens; climbers rambling up trees, or festooning hedges or creeping through shrubs’. Almost all these ideas were adopted and translated by Vita at Sissinghurst. His style became her style.

  Following Robinson, she’d put shrubs together with herbaceous perennials. She’d position wild British natives, her favourite ‘wildlings’, next to exotics she’d got to know during her visits to Italy and Greece and her travels with Harold to Turkey and Persia. She’d put simple cottage flowers with a sweetness to them – wallflowers, poppies, large-flowered Roggli pansies, zinnias and dill – next to sophisticated foreigners – magnolias, abutilons, pomegranates and eremurus. Her garden would include a velvet Gallica rose with a wild honeysuckle left to climb through it and clamber up behind it on the wall; self-sown mulleins in a path, erupting through the purple skirts of an exotic indigofera; aubrieta – banned from smart gardens – in sweeping carpets frothing over the path at the feet of a great clump of her favourite imperial fritillary. Just like her writing, here was a hugely refined mishmash of so many different things, all combined in a luxuriant and glamorous way.

  Luxurious mixed borders in the Rose Garden at Sissinghurst in the 1950s.

  When knitting these groups of one thing, one style of plant, into another, she sometimes worked out her combinations, and sometimes left them a bit to chance and then tinkered with them, to fine-tune the colours and shapes of the design. When she was putting colours together, she tended to favour similar tones – like the blues of the rosemary, pansies and clematis at the entrance arch, preferring these calm, harmonious mixes to strong contrasts. She would sometimes think out these matches quite carefully, and give her readers a good tip for how to do the same:

  ‘I have a gardening dodge which I find very useful. It concerns colour-schemes and plant-groupings. You know how quickly one forgets what one’s garden has looked like during different weeks progressively throughout the year? One makes a mental note, or even a written note, and then the season changes and one forgets what one meant at the time. One has written “Plant something yellow near the yellow tulips,” or “Plant something tall behind the lupins,” and then autumn comes and plants have died down, and one scratches one’s head trying to remember what on earth one intended by that.

  ‘My system is more practical. I observe, for instance, a great pink, lacy crinoline of the May-flowering tamarisk, of which I put in two snippets years ago, and which now spreads the exuberance of its petticoats twenty feet wide over a neglected corner of the garden. What could I plant near it to enhance its colour? It must, of course, be something which will flower at the same time. So I try effects, picking flowers elsewhere, rather in the way that one makes a flower arrangement in the house, sticking them into the ground and then standing back to observe the harmony. The dusky, rosy Iris Senlac is just the right colour: I must split up my clumps as soon as they have finished flowering and make a group of those near the tamarisk for next Ma
y. The common pink columbine, almost a weed, would do well for under-planting, or some pink pansies, Crimson Queen, or the wine-red shades, as a carpet; and, for something really noble, the giant fox-tail lily, Eremurus robustus, eight to ten feet high. I cut, with reluctance, one precious spike from a distant group, and stick it in; it looks fine, like a cathedral spire flushed warm in the sunset. Undoubtedly I should have some eremuri next year with the plumy curtains of the tamarisk behind them, but the eremuri are too expensive and one cannot afford many of them.

  ‘This is just one example. One has the illusion of being an artist painting a picture – putting in a dash of colour here, taking out another dash of colour there, until the whole composition is to one’s liking, and at least one knows exactly what effect will be produced twelve months hence.’

  Vita was also aware of balancing the rounded, bosomy shape with the odd tall spire. Then you’d get an interesting rhythm in a garden and prevent anything becoming too repetitive or dull. In July 1952 she writes in In Your Garden Again:

  ‘You see, I believe that one ought always to regard a garden in terms of architecture as well as of colour. One has huge lumps of, let us say, the shrub roses making large voluminous bushes like a Victorian crinoline, or flinging themselves about in wild sprays; or, putting it another way, some plants make round fat bushes, and seem to demand a contrast in a tall sharp plant, say delphiniums, sticking up in a cathedral spire of bright blue amongst the roses instead of in the orthodox way at the back of a herbaceous border. It is all a question of shape. Architectural shape, demanding the pointed thin ones amongst the fat rounds, as a minaret rises above the dome of a mosque.