Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  Vita was especially fond of painterly plants, ones less noticeable outside in the general garden brouhaha, but when they come inside you can revel in their intricate beauty, sitting right in front of you in a pot or vase: ‘The flowers I like best are the flowers requiring a close inspection before they consent to reveal their innermost secret beauty.’ She was on the lookout for plants with a Fabergé delicacy, markings as if by the brush of a Chinese calligrapher. Vita would always have a good selection around her, including one or two things miraculous and exquisite, detailed and refined. She had lots of bearded irises, their texture and scent often as good as their colour; and delicates such as species crocus, Iris reticulata, meadow fritillaries and Ixia viridiflora.

  This was why she loved to grow things in containers as well as in the garden itself. Then you could see the intricate flowers more clearly. She made a series of miniature gardens in troughs and old sinks and kept a clutch of pots at the entrance to the garden and at the top of the Tower steps. She also had indoor pots in a cold greenhouse. In there, whatever the weather, she could grow a few precious items: lily-of-the-valley and sweet violets forced into flower early, and elegant show auriculas, salpiglossis and tender nerines, all out of the worst of the weather and so still pristine.

  She picked flowers all the time – some sprigs from her great range of flowering shrubs like hamamelis, mahonias, hoheria and Magnolia grandiflora, or a little bunch of spring bulbs, miniature iris, anemones, grape hyacinths, fragrant tazetta narcissus, mixed in with violets and primroses. Her relationship with the plant did not, then, stop at a fleeting whisk past in the garden, but could continue inside as a long hard stare.

  Best known as Vita is for her all-enveloping, voluptuous gardening style and for her single-colour garden rooms, when you looked more closely there would always have been a good proportion of plants possessing a precise and exquisite beauty – something for which she had a great eye. It’s these ideas – intricate plants for the garden and for pots both inside and out, plus lots of things for picking – that we can easily copy, whatever the size of our garden. We can fill our lives with the brilliance of Vita’s ideas, on the small scale if we can’t match the grand.

  WINTER

  Vita liked to have crocuses to pick – just a few – to arrange in an eggcup, scent bottle or sherry glass inside. They’re one of the first markers that the dreary winter is nearly over and that spring is, thank goodness, on its way. My favourite variety is newly bred, so Vita wouldn’t have known it, but ‘Spring Beauty’ has all the delicacy and fineness of the ones she loved. ‘Advance’ and ‘Snow Bunting’ – which she mentions – are both splendid, forced in a pot or left to flower a little later in the garden, then admired or picked from there.

  Crocus ‘Spring Beauty’.

  Crocuses are easy to grow and get better and better every year. Each of the chrysanthus varieties will cross-breed and self-sow, gradually studding your grass till it looks like Boticelli’s Primavera. The best place to see this is in the late Christopher Lloyd’s lawns and meadows at Great Dixter, magnificent for early bulbs at the end of winter. It’s like walking into an Alpine meadow, but even better, distilled and heightened with all the best spring bulbs scattered through the grass. The chrysanthus varieties were Christopher’s favourites. As Fergus Garrett, the head gardener at Dixter, says, there isn’t an ugly one amongst them. There are many patches of ‘Snow Bunting’, deliciously scented, which clumps rather than spreads, with its pure white flowers and free-range-egg-yolk-yellow centres. If you follow Vita’s recommendations, you’ll have a succession flowering from January until the end of March. Here are some comments from In Your Garden Again, for February 1953:

  ‘I now find myself regretting that I did not plant more of the species crocuses which are busy coming out in quick succession. They are so very charming, and so very small. If you can go and see them in a nursery garden or at a flower show, do take the opportunity to make a choice. Grown in bowls or Alpine pans they are enchanting for the house; they recall those miniature works of art created by the great Russian artificer Fabergé in the luxurious days when the very rich could afford such extravagances. Grown in stone troughs out of doors, they look exquisitely in scale with their surroundings, since in open beds or even in pockets of a rockery they are apt to get lost in the vast areas of landscape beyond.

  ‘One wants to see them close to the eye, fully to appreciate the pencilling on the outside of the petals; it seems to have been drawn with a fine brush, perhaps wielded by some sure-handed Chinese calligrapher, feathering them in bronze or in lilac. Not the least charm of these little crocuses is their habit of throwing up several blooms to a stem (it is claimed for Ancyrensis that a score will grow from a single bulb). Just when you think they are going off, a fresh crop appears.

  ‘Ancyrensis, from Ankara and Asia Minor, yellow, is usually the first to flower in January or early February, closely followed by chrysanthus and its seedlings E. A. Bowles, yellow and brown; E. P. Bowles, a deeper yellow feathered with purple; Moonlight, sulphur yellow and cream; Snow Bunting, cream and lilac; Warley White, feathered with purple. That fine species, Imperati, from Naples and Calabria, is slightly larger, violet-blue and straw-coloured; it flowers in February. Susianus, February and March, is well known as the Cloth of Gold crocus; Sieberi, a Greek, lilac-blue, is also well known; but Suterianus and its seedling Jamie are less often seen. Jamie must be the tiniest of all: a pale violet with deeper markings on the outside, he is no more than the size of a shilling across when fully expanded, and two inches high. I measured.

  ‘I have mentioned only a few of this delightful family, which should, by the way, be planted in August.’

  For the start of the year, Vita liked to have plenty of Iris reticulata in as many of its different forms as she could find. She planted enough so as to be able to admire their stalwartness out in the brutal February conditions, in the open borders or in one of her precious troughs (see here), as well as some in pots to bring inside. They are marvellous inside, but the flowers are transient in the heat.

  Very persistent bulbs, their numbers grew more and more each year and you’ll still find lots at Sissinghurst, in the troughs in the Top Courtyard and popping up in patches in Delos and the Lime Walk. There are many forms, but I particularly love the luscious ruby-purple ‘Pauline’ (similar to ‘Hercules’ in Vita’s list below), the bluer-purple ‘Harmony’, as well as the bright mauve ‘Cantab’, which she also mentions. And add to these the red-purple silk velvet, Iris histrioides, ‘George’.

  Iris reticulata ‘Rhapsody’.

  Vita’s enthusiasm, as ever, is infectious:

  ‘It seems extraordinary that anything so gay, delicate, and brilliant should really prefer the rigours of winter to the amenities of spring. It is true that we can grow Iris reticulata in pots under glass if we wish to do so, and that the result will be extremely satisfying and pretty, but the far more pleasing virtue of Iris reticulata is that it will come into bloom out of doors as early as February, with no coddling or forcing at all. Purple flecked with gold, it will open its buds even above the snow. The ideal place to grow it is in a pocket of rather rich though well-drained soil amongst stones; a private place which it can have all to itself for the short but grateful days of its consummation.

  ‘Reticulata – the netted iris. Not the flower is netted, but the bulb. The bulb wears a little fibrous coat, like a miniature fishing-net. It is a native of the Caucasus, and there is a curious fact about it: the Caucasian native is reddish, whereas our European garden form is a true Imperial purple …

  ‘I do suggest that every flower-lover should grow a patch of the little reticulata somewhere in his garden. The variety Cantab, a pale turquoise blue, flowers about a fortnight earlier as a rule; Hercules, a subfusc ruby-red, comes at the same time as the species.’

  Aconites would add to this delicate mix, putting in an appearance at a bleak and freezing moment early in the year. The great thing about aconites, as Vita say
s, is that without any pampering they will gradually spread all through any shady spot in the garden. Dig up a clump just after flowering – ‘in the green’ – and scatter it to several other places that would be cheered by a January–February carpet of gold. You’ll forget about it for a couple of years, but then, settled in, it will start to put on a show and will do so for decades. Pick a few to arrange in a tiny vase or float some in a shallow bowl supported on crisp beech leaves.

  A bowl of winter aconites – Eranthis hyemalis.

  ‘The courage of some small and apparently fragile flowers never ceases to amaze me,’ Vita says. ‘Here are we humans, red-nosed and blue-cheeked in the frost and the snow, looking dreadfully plain; but there are the little flowers coming up, as brave and gay as can be, unaffected by snow or frost. The winter aconite is a cheerful resister, coming through the white ground with puffs of snow all over his bright burnished face, none the worse in his January–February beauty, and increasing from self-sown seedlings year after year.

  ‘We cannot be reminded too often of so dear and early a thing. It started flowering here, in Kent, on January 20th; I made a note in my diary. Then frost came, turning it into tiny crystallized apricots, like the preserved fruits one used once to get given for Christmas. They shone; they sparkled in the frost. Then the frost went, and with the thaw, they emerged from their rimy sugar coating into their full, smooth, buttercup yellow on a February day with its suggestion of spring, when the first faint warmth of the sun falls as a surprise upon our naked hands.

  ‘I am being strictly correct in comparing the varnished yellow of the Winter Aconite to our common buttercup, for they both belong to the same botanical order of the Ranunculaceae.

  ‘The proper name of the Winter Aconite is Eranthis. Eranthis hyemalis is the one usually grown, and should be good enough for anybody. These are cheap, but if you want a superior variety you can order E. Tubergenii. I daresay this would be worth trying. Personally I am very well satisfied with the smudge of gold given me by hyemalis (meaning, of winter). It has the great advantage of flourishing almost anywhere, in shade or sun, under trees or in the open, and also of producing a generous mustard-and-cress-like crop of self-sown seedlings which you can lift and transplant. It is better to do this than to lift the older plants, for it is one of those home-lovers that likes to stay put, and, indeed, will give of its best only when it has had a couple of years to become established. So do not get impatient with it at first. Give it time.

  ‘There are many small early things one could happily associate with it; in fact, I can imagine, and intend to plant, a winter corner, stuffed with little companions all giving their nursery party at the same time: Narcissus minimus [now known as Narcissus asturiensis] and Narcissus nanus; the bright blue thimbles of the earliest grape hyacinth, Muscari azureus; the delicate spring crocus Tomasinianus, who sows himself everywhere, scores of little Thomases all over the place … but I must desist.’

  Cyclamen give a similar delicacy and scale at almost any time of year, their leaves often as appealing as the flowers themselves. For January and February, you want Cyclamen coum, one of the first to appear in any garden. These come in a range of colours, but none better than that deep saturated pink. You can plant this right in amongst the roots of deciduous trees such as beech and oak, and they will poke their heads up through the coppery carpet of fallen leaves. They cope perfectly happily in the desert of dry shade, and Vita’s selection (below) will give you a succession of flowers to cover most of the year. Like the species crocuses and aconites, these will gradually self-sow and naturalise.

  One of the most beautiful winter containers I’ve ever seen was planted with Cyclamen coum as a carpet below the magnificent snowdrop, ‘Samuel Arnott’. This was created by Julian and Isabel Bannerman at Hanham Court, outside Bristol, and is just the sort of thing Vita might have done in one of her stone troughs, a simple sweep of something small-scale, jewelled and glorious.

  Cyclamen coum and Galanthalus ‘Samuel Arnott’.

  Vita goes into detail: ‘There are two kinds of cyclamen: the Persian, which is the one your friends give you, and which is not hardy [see more on this in the greenhouse section here], and the small, out-door one, a tiny edition of the big Persian, as hardy as a snowdrop. These little cyclamen are among the longest-lived of garden plants. A cyclamen corm will keep itself going for more years than its owner is likely to live. They have other advantages: (1) they will grow under trees, for they tolerate, and indeed enjoy, shade; (2) they do not object to a limy soil; (3) they will seed themselves and (4) they will take you round the calendar by a judicious planting of different sorts. C. neapolitanum, for instance, will precede its ivy-like leaves by its little pink flower in late autumn, white flowers if you get the variety album; C. coum, pink, white, or lilac, will flower from December to March; C. ibericum from February to the end of March; C. balearicum will then carry on, followed by C. repandum, which takes you into the summer; and, finally, C. europaeum for the late summer and early autumn …

  ‘Anyone who grows the little cyclamen will have observed that they employ an unusual method of twiddling a kind of corkscrew, or coil, to project the seeds from the capsule when ready. One would imagine that the coil would go off with a ping, rather like the mainspring of a clock when one overwinds it, thus flinging the seeds far and wide, and this indeed was the theory put forward by many botanists.

  ‘It would appear, however, that nothing of the kind happens, and that the seeds are gently deposited on the parent corm. Why, then, this elaborate apparatus of the coil, if it serves only to drop the seed on to a hard corm and not on to the soft receptive soil? It has been suggested … that this concentration of the seeds may be Nature’s idea of providing a convenient little heap for some distributing agent to carry away, and [a correspondent] points out that ants may be seen, in later summer, hurrying off with the seeds until not one is left. I confess that I have never sat up with a cyclamen long enough to watch this curious phenomenon of the exploding capsule; and I still wonder how and why seedlings so obligingly appear in odd corners of the garden – never, I must add, very far away from the parent patch.

  ‘So accommodating are they that you can plant them at almost any time, though ideally they should be planted when dormant, i.e. in June or July.’

  Winter has always been an important season in Vita’s garden, and she came up with the idea of a special corner, jam-packed with all the plants just described: ‘January to the end of March. I wish we had a name for that intermediate season which includes St. Valentine’s Day, February 14th, and All Fools’ Day, April 1st. It is neither one thing nor the other, neither winter nor spring. Could we call it wint-pring, which has a good Anglo-Saxon sound about it, and accept it, like marriage, for better or worse?

  ‘My wint-pring corner shall be stuffed with every sort of bulb or corm that will flower during those few scanty weeks. The main point is that it shall be really stuffed; crammed full; packed tight…’

  In addition, ‘there will be some early tulips, such as Tulipa biflora and turkestanica and Kaufmaniana, the water-lily tulip, flowering in March. There will be Scilla biflora and Scilla Tubergeniana, both flowering in February; and as a ground work, to follow after the winter aconites, I shall cram the ground with the Greek Anemone blanda, opening her starry blue flower in the rare sun of February, and with the Italian Anemone Apennina, who comes a fortnight later and carries on into March and is at her best in April. Terrible spreaders, these anemones; but so blue a carpet may gladly be allowed to spread.

  ‘… The winter corner should be cheap to plant; and needs, humbly, only a little patch of ground where you can find one. Let it be in a place which you pass frequently, and can observe from day to day.’

  SPRING

  Vita loved the meadow fritillary perhaps more than any spring bulb, partly for its subtlety, for, ‘less showy than the buttercup, less spectacular than the foxglove in the wood, it seems to put a damask shadow over the grass, as though dusk we
re falling under a thunder-cloud that veiled the setting sun…’ She also loved it for its hidden drama. It is, as she says in Some Flowers, ‘a flower to put in a glass on your table. It is a flower to peer into. In order to appreciate its true beauty, you will have to learn to know it intimately. You must look closely at all its little squares, and also turn its bell up towards you so that you can look right down into its depths, and see the queer semi-transparency of the strangely foreign, wine-coloured chalice. It is a sinister little flower, sinister in its mournful colours of decay.’

  Meadow fritillary – Fritillaria meleagris.

  Vita planted lots of snakeshead fritillaries in the Orchard underneath the fruit trees: ‘In its native state the bulb grows very deep down,’ she explains, ‘so taking a hint from Nature we ought to plant it in our own gardens at a depth of at least six to eight inches. There is another good reason for doing this: pheasants are fond of it, and are liable to scratch it up if planted too shallow. Apart from its troubles with pheasants, it is an extremely obliging bulb and will flourish almost anywhere in good ordinary soil, either in grass or in beds. It looks best in grass, of course, where it is naturally meant to be, but I do not think it much matters where you put it, since you are unlikely to plant the million bulbs which would be necessary in order to reproduce anything like the natural effect, and are much more likely to plant just the few dozen which will give you enough flowers for picking.’