‘With grey-green glaucous leaves, it produces its wide, loose, white-and-gold flowers on slender stems five or six feet in height. The petals are like crumpled tissue paper; the anthers quiver in a golden swarm at the centre. It is very lovely and delicate.
‘I don’t mean delicate as to its constitution, except perhaps in very bleak districts. Once you get it established it will run about all over the place, being what is known as a root-runner, and may even come up in such unlikely and undesirable positions as the middle of a path. I know one which has wriggled its way under a brick wall and come up manfully on the other side. The initial difficulty is to get it established, because it hates being disturbed and transplanted, and the best way to cheat it of this reluctance is to grow it from root cuttings in pots. This will entail begging a root cutting from a friend or an obliging nurseryman. You can then tip it out of its pot into a complaisant hole in the place where you want it to grow, and hope that it will not notice what has happened to it. Plants, poor innocents, are easily deceived …
Romneya coulteri.
‘It likes a sunny place and not too rich a soil. It will get cut down in winter most likely, but this does not matter, because it will spring up again, and in any case it does not appear to flower on the old wood, so the previous season’s growth is no loss. In fact, you will probably find it advisable to cut it down yourself in the spring, if the winter frosts have not already done it for you.’
She offers another suggestion:
‘A good companion to the tree-poppy is the tall, twelve-foot shrub which keeps on changing its name. When I first knew and grew it, it called itself Plagianthus Lyallii. Now it prefers to call itself Hoheria lanceolata [now correctly called Hoheria lyalli (see following page)]. Let it, for all I care. So far as I am concerned, it is the thing to grow behind the tree-poppy, which it will out-top and will complement with the same colouring of the pale green leaves and the smaller white flowers, in a candid white and green and gold bridal effect more suitable, one would think, to April than to July. Doubts have been cast upon its hardiness, but I have one here (in Kent) which has weathered a particularly draughty corner where, in optimistic ignorance, I planted it years ago. There is no denying, however, that it is happier with some shelter by a wall or a hedge.’
Hoheria lyallii has ivory-coloured flowers, beautiful singles like one of the Japanese cherries, only each flower is almost twice the size. They feel like spring blossom but come in summer, their flowers a fine contrast to their bright apple-green leaves. There’s almost no lovelier jug of flowers to have in a great cloud at the end of summer. As Vita says, ‘I can’t think why people don’t grow Hoheria lyallii often, if they have a sheltered corner and want a tall 10-ft. shrub that flowers in that awkward time between late June and early July, smothered in white-and-gold flowers of the mallow family, to which the hollyhock also belongs, and sows itself in such profusion that you could have a whole forest of it if you had the leisure to prick out the seedlings and the space to replant them.
Hoheria lyalii, one of Vita’s favourite summer shrubs with beautiful saucer-like flowers, similar to cherry blossom.
‘It really is a lovely thing, astonishing me every year with its profusion. I forget about it; and then there it is again with its flowers coming in their masses suggesting philadelphus, for which it might easily be mistaken, but even more comely than any philadelphus, I think, thanks to the far prettier and paler leaf.
‘It has other advantages. It doesn’t dislike a limy soil, always an important consideration for people who garden on chalk and can’t grow any of the lime-haters. It doesn’t like rich feeding, which tends to make it produce leaf rather than flower. This means an economy in compost or organic manures or inorganic fertilizers which could be better expended elsewhere. Bees love it. It is busy with bees, making their midsummer noise as you pass by.’
She also loved the ‘false acacia’, Robinia pseudoacacia, another small tree which was – and still is – little grown in England. She would have come across it, as she says, in her travels to the Mediterranean, where it’s still a common tree lining many small squares and side streets. It’s a delicate, fine-looking thing which does not throw too much shade, so it’s ideal for a small country or town garden and its flowers have a delicious orange blossom scent. In France they dip them in batter and serve them – scattered with sugar – as a pudding.
These trees ‘abound in France and Italy,’ she remarks, ‘but are equally at home with us. There are few summer-flowering trees prettier than they, when they hang out their pale, sweet-scented tassels, and few faster of growth for people in a hurry. I have planted them no taller than a walking-stick, and within a contemptible number of years they have taken on the semblance of an established inhabitant, with sizeable trunks and a rugged bark and a spreading head, graceful and fringy. If they have a fault, it is that their boughs are brittle, that they make a good deal of dead wood, and, I suspect, are not very long-lived, especially if the main trunk has forked, splitting the tree into halves. This danger can be forestalled by allowing only one stem to grow up, with no subsidiary lower branches.
‘If, after reading this cautionary tale, you still decide to plant an acacia, let me suggest that you might try not only the ordinary white-flowered one, but also the lovely pink one, Robinia hispida, the rose acacia. It is no more expensive to buy than the white, and is something less often seen, a surprise to people who expect white flowers and suddenly see pink. Robinia kelseyi is another rose-pink form much to be recommended.’
There is now a fully grown fifty-foot tree on the edge of the Cottage Garden as it borders the Nuttery – which, despite what she says above about it being short-lived, has lasted the eighty-odd years since she planted it. This perfumes the entire Cottage Garden in May and June and you can hear the whole tree buzzing with pollinators.
Also discovered on her French travels, she loved the chintz-flower looks of Hibiscus syriacus, also known as Althea frutex, but you need to find it a sheltered sunny spot to ensure it flowers well. I grow this in a pot in my cold greenhouse. It is one of ‘the tree hollyhocks, which you can get with blue flowers, or claret coloured, or white, or mauve,’ she tells her readers. ‘I like especially the white form with purple blotch at the base, reminiscent of a Victorian chintz, and, moreover, it seems to give more generously of its flowers than the blue and the red varieties. They flower in August and have the advantage of living to a great age, for I remember seeing one in south-western France with a trunk the size of a young oak. Its owner assured me that it had been in her garden for over a hundred years. “Mais bien sûr, madame, c’est mon arrière-grand-père qui l’a planté.” It had been trained as a standard, with a great rounded head smothered in flowers.’
Her final must-have for August is Tamarix pentandra, the ‘summer-flowering tamarisk which flowers … during that month when flowering shrubs are few. We do not grow the tamarisks enough; they are so graceful, so light and buoyant, so feathery, so pretty when smothered in their rose-pink flower. The earlier-flowering one is Tamarix tetrandra; comes out in April to May.’
AUTUMN
Vita did not at first plant many hydrangeas at Sissinghurst. She had the climber Hydrangea petiolaris on one of the east-facing walls, but at least initially she had reservations about them – the coarser ones reminded her of ‘coloured wigs’. She probably associated them with rather more formal Edwardian borders, a look she was trying to avoid, but seeing them in other people’s gardens looking good, she began to like them more.
‘I really prefer the looser kinds called paniculata,’ she writes, ‘which have a flat central head fringed by open sterile flowers; a particularly pleasing variety is called Sargentii. Another good one is Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora. It was with a startled pleasure that I observed three bushes growing in a cottage garden as I drove along a secret lane. They looked like pink lilac. Tall, pyramidal in shape, smothered in pointed panicles of flower, they suggested a bush of pink lilac in May. Yet this
was September … Puzzled, I stopped by the roadside to investigate.
‘It was Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora, sometimes called the plumed hydrangea. In its native country, Japan, it is said to attain a height of twenty-five feet, but in this country it apparently limits itself to something between six and eight feet; and quite enough, too, for the average garden. Do not confuse it with H. hortensis, the one which sometimes comes sky-blue but more often a dirty pink, and which is the one usually seen banked up in Edwardian opulence against the grandstand of our more fashionable race-courses. H. paniculata grandiflora, in spite of its resounding name, is less offensively sumptuous and has a far subtler personality.
‘It reveals, for instance, a sense of humour, and even of fantasy in the colouring it adopts throughout its various stages. It starts off by flowering white; then turns into the pink I have already described as looking like pink lilac. Then it turns greenish, a sort of sea-green, so you never know where you are with it, as you never know where you are with some human personalities, but that makes them all the more interesting. Candidly white one moment; prettily pink the next; and virulently green in the last resort … As I was leaning over the gate, looking at this last pink-green inflorescence, the tenant of the cottage observed me and came up. Yes, he said, it has been in flower for the last three months. It changes its colour as the months go by, he said.’
There have been lots of new varieties of H. paniculata since Vita’s day and they are much underrated – widely grown in France and Germany, but little known here. They are big (about three feet by three feet if pruned), but not too big, so go well at the back of a herbaceous border, or underplanting and interlinking with taller shrubs. They are also excellent at an entrance or as a marker at the beginning or end of a bed, and are particularly lovely mixed with shrubs with variegated leaves. They look good throughout the summer, reach their flowery peak in the autumn and have good winter interest, only needing to be cut back in March or April.
I particularly like Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’. This opens the cleanest, brightest, acid green, with a brilliant architectural chiselled flower form, unfurling to cups in a green-washed cream. Then the flowers fully flatten and turn pure ivory, before being washed with rich pink, the last stage before they gracefully brown and dry on the stem. It’s an amazing succession which lasts from August until January, or even longer if the flowers are not thrashed around too much by the wind and rain.
‘Hydrangea aspera ‘Kawakamii’ group.
Vita goes on to say: ‘Hydrangea aspera is good too and there are some decorative forms called villosa and Sargentiana. A bush, pouring over a paved path or covering the angle of a flight of steps, is a rich and rewarding sight in August, when everything becomes heavy and dark and lumpish.’ It’s true – any H. aspera is gorgeous, but a newly found form called ‘Kawakamii’, in particular, is an amazing performer. It has no sensitivity to pH, so its flowers keep their lovely colour whatever the profile of your soil. It goes on flowering very long and late, retaining its delicate beauty and wonderful overall shape. With just one plant you get a complex multi-storey effect, perfect for filling a corner in any partly shaded place. The only problem with hydrangeas is that none of them do well in a drought.
Vita planted several indigoferas, still little known and grown but even rarer then, and there are still a couple in the garden. These are all, as Vita puts it, ‘graceful shrubs which should be more freely planted. They throw out long sprays, seven or eight feet in length, dangling with pinkish, vetch-like flowers in August and September all along the tall, curving sprays. Like the fuchsias, they will probably get cut down in frosty weather, but this does not matter, because in any case you should prune them to the ground in April, when, like the fuchsias, they will shoot up again. They thrive at the foot of a south wall. There are several varieties, all desirable: Gerardiana, Potaninii, and Pendula … Indigofera Potaninii is a pale, pretty pink; I. Gerardiana is deeper in colour, with more mauve in it, and is perhaps the more showy of the two. They should both, I think, be planted in conjunction, so that their sprays can mingle in a cloud of the two different colours … I must end by urging you to grow Indigofera pendula. This is a surprisingly lovely thing. It arches in long sprays of pinkish-mauve pea-like flowers, growing ten feet high, dangling very gracefully from its delicate foliage.’
Indigofera pendula.
Nick Macer, the plant collector and discerning nurseryman at Pan-Global in Gloucestershire, names Indigofera pendula as one of his favourite plants. When I saw it in his garden he had self-sown Verbena bonariensis growing up through it, vertical purple spires from below, with a lovely white climbing Cobaea pringlei draped from above. It made a brilliant combination.
As the autumn goes on, flowering shrubs become almost nonexistent, bar the stalwart fuchsia brigade. Anyone who wants at least a bit of colour in their October and November garden would be mad not to include some of these. There are stacks of new hybrids with complicated tiered rah-rah skirts in zingy contrasting colours, but I don’t think these would be Vita’s thing.
She quite rightly tells us there are some fuchsias much hardier than we think: ‘It is quite unnecessary to associate them only with Cornwall, Devon and the west coast of Scotland. Several varieties will flourish in any reasonably favourable county, and although they will probably be cut to the ground by frost in winter, there is no cause for alarm, for they will spring up again from the base in time to flower generously in midsummer and right the way through the autumn. As an extra precaution, the central clump or crown can be covered with dry leaves, bracken, or soil drawn up to a depth of three or four inches; and in case of extremely hard weather an old sack can temporarily be thrown over them. Their arching sprays are graceful; I like the ecclesiastical effect of their red and purple amongst the dark green of their foliage; and, of course, when you have nothing else to do you can go round popping the buds.
‘The most familiar is probably Fuchsia magellanica Riccartonii, which will flower from July to October. F. gracilis I like less; it is a spindly-looking thing, and F. magellanica Thompsonii is a better version of it. F. Mrs. Popple, cherry-red and violet; Mme Cornelissen, red and white; and Margaret, red and violet, are all to be recommended.
‘They … like a sunny place in rather rich soil with good drainage. You can increase them by cuttings inserted under a hand-light [a glass cloche] or a frame in spring.’
Vita’s final recommendation, not for their flowers but for their seedpods and brilliant autumn leaves, are the coluteas, plants that many people are snooty about, feeling they’re common as muck and not worth growing.
Often anti-snob about these things, Vita had a line in such garden plants, and she was keen on these particular ones. My parents – possibly under her influence – also grew one of the coluteas, and as a child I loved popping the swollen banana-shaped seedpods, blown up taut like a balloon. Here’s what Vita says about them:
‘Two shrubs or little trees with an amazingly long flowering period – Colutea arborescens and Colutea media, the Bladder Sennas. They have been flowering profusely for most of the summer, and were still very decorative in the middle of October. Of the two I prefer the latter. C. arborescens has yellow flowers; but although media (with bronze flowers) is perhaps the more showy, they go very prettily together, seeming to complement one another in their different colouring. Graceful of growth with their long sprays of acacia-like foliage, amusingly hung with the bladders of seed-pods looking as though they would pop with a small bang, like a blown-up paper bag, if you burst them between your hands … which give them their English name, the bright small flowers suggest swarms of winged insects. C. arborescens amuses me, because it carries its flowers and its seed-pods at the same time. In one garden where I saw it the pods were turning pink, very pretty amongst the flowers.
‘They are of the easiest possible cultivation, doing best in a sunny place, and having a particular value in that they may be used to clothe a dry bank where few other things w
ould thrive, nor do they object to an impoverished stony soil. They are easy to propagate, either by cuttings or by seed, and they may be kept shapely by pruning in February, within a couple of inches of the old wood.
‘I know that highbrow gardeners do not consider them as very choice. Does that matter? To my mind they are delicately elegant, and anything which will keep on blooming right into mid-October has my gratitude.
‘By the way, they are not the kind of which you can make senna-tea. Children may thus regard them without suspicion and will need little encouragement to pop the seedpods. It is as satisfactory as popping fuchsias.’
PLACING AND PRUNING
The shrubs and roses were often placed right by the path, rather than further back in the border, and then minimally and loosely pruned – all contributing to the ‘cram, cram, cram’ of Vita’s garden look. This is one of the most noticeable things about the photographs of the early garden: within the yew hedges, or the brick-wall edges of the garden ‘rooms’, were living divisions, decorative curtains splitting the space into cosier corners, areas which would work on an intimate, human scale.
Vita wanted her garden to mimic a Dutch flower painting, as she wrote in The Land, like a ‘Dutchman’s canvas crammed to absurdity’.
Vita felt firmly that, once the massed plantings or large individual shrubs were well established, it was important to shape and prune them, but not too much. So as to be safe and not over-prune, she tells us in More for Your Garden, do this when they’re going at full tilt in the summer, not at normal pruning time in autumn or winter. ‘By this time of the year, most of our plants have grown into their full summer masses, and this is the moment when the discerning gardener goes round not only with his notebook but also with his secateurs and with that invaluable instrument on a pole 8 ft. long, terminated by a parrot’s beak, which will hook down and sever any unwanted twig as easily as crooking your finger.’ If you wait till winter, it’s difficult to see or remember the effect you want, and then it’s all too easy to wantonly hack away.
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