Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘They need re-potting every three years or so, and it is best to get a ready-made mixture from a nurseryman. Re-plant as firmly as you possibly can, ramming the sphagnum compost down with strong fingers and a blunt stick like an enormously fat, unsharpened pencil, and use plenty of small crocks for drainage.’

  I was sent a couple of varieties of these – the so-called pansy-flowered orchid – a white and purple and a rich green and white form, for Christmas last year and they flowered on a regime of almost total neglect until the middle of spring. They’re one of the longest-flowering indoor plants I’ve grown.

  POTS FOR OUTSIDE

  Vita liked pot gardening. It was at the base of her Tower, on the brick steps, as well as by the main arch entrance that she collected together many of her favourite things, grown in terracotta groups. These plants were raised under cover in the hot or the cold greenhouse and just came out for their summer season. She says:

  ‘I like the habit of pot gardening. It reminds me of the South – Italy, Spain, Provence, where pots of carnations and zinnias are stood carelessly about, in a sunny courtyard or rising in tiers on the treads of an outside stair, dusty but oh how gay! I know it entails constant watering, but consider the convenience of being able to set down a smear of colour just where you need it, in some corner where an earlier flower has gone off. We should take this hint from other lands. We do not make nearly enough use of pots in our country, partly, I suspect, because we have no tradition of pot-making here, nothing to compare with the camellia-pot, a common thing in Italy, swagged with garlands looped from a lion’s mouth. Several times have I tried to persuade brick-makers to reproduce this standardized Italian model. They look at it with suspicion and alarm. “Oh, no, we couldn’t do that. We have never done anything like that. Sorry, we can’t oblige.”’

  A huge copper that Vita filled every year with tulips. It was found when all the rubbish was cleared out of the piggery.

  Before so many tender perennials became available through the 1970s and 80s – things like arctotis, gazanias, argyranthemums and a wide range of salvias, which we all take for granted for our outdoor summer containers – there was a much more limited range of summer bedding. Vita had a favoured one or two, which she propagated from one year to the next in her greenhouse, some for pots and some for planting in her beds in prominent corners:

  ‘People who have a frost-proof greenhouse in which to winter some tender plants, might well consider keeping a stock of the Blue Daisy, Felicia amelloides. It is a little shrub, or sub-shrub, about 18 in. high, from South Africa, easily raised from seed or cuttings as a pot-plant, to set out in the open border towards the end of May, when it will flower continuously until the time comes to dig it up and re-pot it and carry it back into shelter for the winter. Its constant supply of starry, bright blue flowers makes it a very desirable asset in the summer border, even if it cannot claim to share the rich sapphire of the gentians. The forget-me-not comes closer within its range of colour; or some blue Northern eyes.

  ‘It is botanically related to the asters. Aster amellus is a familiar term in gardening language, but perhaps only a very small percentage of gardeners who talk glibly about Aster amellus realize that they are going right back to the poet Virgil, who in the first century B.C. gave the name Amellus to a blue-flowered plant found wild on the banks of the River Mella in Italy. Thus do classical times connect with our present-day gardening. Rather romantically, I think, as well as classically.

  ‘There is another form of this pretty blue daisy which can be grown from seed as a half-hardy annual. This is Felicia Bergeriana, the Kingfisher daisy, well named since it really does suggest a flight of kingfishers stopped on the wing and held stationary for our enjoyment. No one could arrest a kingfisher in flight, that flash of blue; but the Kingfisher daisy is the next best thing.’

  Felicia amelloides still puts in an appearance at Sissinghurst in pots, as does Tweedia caerulea, which is planted in a beautiful verdigris copper, found in the garden in its ruined state and placed by Vita to the right of the Tower steps. Pam and Sybille established a tradition with this container, which has remained ever since. There are several tweedia plants in the copper and another clutch around the base, to one side, as if the colour is spilling on to the ground beneath. It’s a beautiful bit of planting.

  The marble bowl resting on three lions in the Herb Garden – brought back by Vita and Harold from their time in Constantinople.

  Black-eyed Susan – Thunbergia alata.

  One of four Bagatelle urns, which Vita was given from the Wallace Collection by her mother, containing Verbena ‘Sissinghurst’.

  Sparaxis tricolor, a favourite of Vita’s for instant colour.

  More of us should grow tweedia – it’s easy, and you can keep it going from one year to the next:

  ‘The happy few who still maintain a greenhouse, however small, sufficiently warmed in winter to keep the frost out, will find themselves repaid if they can make room for a few pots of the unfamiliar, pretty, blue-flowered Oxypetalum caeruleum … [Vita added later: ‘Oxypetalum caeruleum is now known as Tweedia caerulea, or Amblyopetalum caeruleum.’] It is a native of Brazil.

  ‘This, admittedly, is subtle rather than showy, but I notice that it always attracts attention when we stand the pots out of doors for the summer in the garden. It has downy-green leaves and flowers of a curious greyish-blue, with a bright blue button no bigger than a flattened seed-pearl in the middle. I like to associate it with some pots of Plumbago capensis, whose stronger blue marries into a mist of blues reinforcing one another. Both, of course, are cool greenhouse plants, but they will live very happily in the open from the end of May until October.’

  It’s on the Tower steps that the extraordinary verdigris flower Puya alpestris (see here) was placed, and often still is, a truly magnificent flower which takes many years to get to a sufficient size to bloom, but is hugely worth it if you have the patience. It looks like something straight out of the Malaysian rain forest.

  Pride of place should also be reserved for Vita’s ‘luxury’, the incredible Lilium auratum, which she describes in Some Flowers:

  ‘Less wayward than [the famously tricky Madonna lily], L. candidum, in fact not wayward at all, [for] there is no reason why the golden-rayed lily of Japan should not grow satisfactorily for all of us. It is said that the Japanese complacently ate the bulbs as a vegetable, much as we eat the potato or the artichoke, until, fortunately for us, they realized the commercial value to European gardens, when the slopes of Fujiyama started yielding a profitable harvest of bulbs timed to reach this country shortly after New Year’s Day.

  ‘There are two ways in which we can grow this superb lily: in the open, preferably with the protection of shrubs, or in pots. I do not, myself, very much like the association of lilies with shrubs. It always looks to me too much like the-thing-one-has-been-told-is-the-right-thing-to-do. It savours too much of the shrubbery border effect, and suggests all too clearly that the lilies have been added in order to give “an interest after the flowering shrubs are over”. This is not quite fair an accusation, since shrubs do certainly provide an ideal shelter for lilies, but still I retain a personal distaste for the arrangement. I cannot agree, for instance, that Lilium auratum looks more “handsome” against a background of rhododendron or azalea; I think they look infinitely more handsome standing independently in pots set, let us say, on a flight of garden steps. Of course this method involves a little more trouble. It means carrying the pots to the desired position, and watering them throughout the growing season. Still it is worthwhile, and if they can be placed somewhere near a garden bench their scent alone is sufficient justification.

  ‘Luckily, they are very amenable to life in pots, provided the pots are large enough and are filled with a rich enough compost of peat and leaf-mould. It is as well to stake them when planting the bulbs, remembering that they may grow to a height of seven feet, especially the variety platyphyllum which is the finest of all. White and g
old and curly, it unfolds to expose its leopard-like throat in truly superb and towering arrogance.’

  Tigridias, Mexican tiger flowers, are ideal for pots too, ten or fifteen bulbs planted in a shallow tray. You can plant these in a very sheltered position, at the base – as Vita says – of a sun-drenched wall with big eaves to protect them from the rain, but they’re ideal, and safer, grown in a pot.

  ‘This is a wildly beautiful exotic-looking thing,’ she writes. ‘It throws only one flower at a time, and that flower lasts only one day, but it is of such superlative beauty and is succeeded by so many other blooms, day after day, that it is well worth the money you will have to pay for a dozen of mixed varieties. They are low-growing, not a foot in height, and they are of an amazing brilliance and diversity of colour: coral, orange, buttercup-yellow, red, and the purest white. If you have grown them before they will need no recommendation from me. If you have never grown them I beg you to give them a trial; I think you will be surprised. A sunny place is essential.’

  You can either keep them in their pot or take them out in the autumn, storing them in a frost-proof shed, and replanting them again the following spring.

  Sparaxis was another Vita choice of bulb for early-summer flowering, just thrown willy-nilly into a pot for weeks of blooms. I’ve had a large pot containing thirty bulbs planted five years ago which I store on the floor in a cold greenhouse. When it’s about to flower, I bring it into pride of place for the six weeks or so it goes on looking good. Every day, new flowers emerge, saucers in cream, yellow and red, each one precisely eyeliner-pencilled around its golden heart.

  ‘I also like the true sparaxis … which you should grow … in a warm south-facing bed under a wall, or in a pan under glass for early flowering, or in the rock-garden, where it should live happily for years, given the sharp drainage all these South Africans need.

  ‘I have kept a pan of sparaxis for years, cruelly neglected, but coming up and flowering gallantly every spring. There is a particularly showy one amongst them, which I think must be Excelsior, a very brilliant dark red with a yellow eye and black splotches.’

  Vita also liked to have pots of the more delicate gladiolus, such as ‘The Bride’, and she loved the fragrant Acidanthera. Her advice for crocuses in pots (see here) is true for gladioli too. You want to cram them in almost touching:

  ‘That frail and lovely little gladiolus colvillei The Bride should have been potted up before Christmas, but it is not too late to do so until the end of February. If I had a stony, sun-baked terrace on the Riviera I should grow it by the hundred; as it is, I content myself with a dozen in two pots under glass [which can be moved outside]. I know very well that people do grow it out of doors in England, lifting the corms each autumn as you would do with other gladioli, but its white delicacy is really seen to better advantage as a picked [or potted] flower than lost in the competition of the garden.

  ‘Some gardeners have a theory that the corms are not worth keeping after the first year and that it is better to renew annually. I believe this to be an unnecessarily extravagant idea. The little offsets always to be found clustering round the parent corm may be grown on until they come to flowering size in their second year. Naturally, this means a preliminary gap of one season, but once the rhythm is established the succession is assured.

  ‘I have found that the same system works with Acidanthera bicolor Murieliae, itself a form of gladiolus, and with those tiny starry narcissi Watereri, which are difficult to keep otherwise and rather expensive to buy. These, by the way, are a real treasure for a pan in an Alpine house, or in a raised trough out of doors where they can be examined at leisure and more or less at eye-level.’

  When frost threatened, it was ‘time to bring the tender pot-plants under cover for the winter. What a lot of pleasure they have given, throughout the summer months, those pots of the scented ivy-leaf pelargonium, those pots of the lemon-scented verbena, standing about in a casual way round our front doors or in odd corners of the garden, where you can tweak a leaf off and put it in your pocket or your buttonhole each morning. I wonder why people don’t use pot-plants more frequently in this country, especially those people who have not a large garden and want to make use of every yard of space, easy to set a pot down on, taking up little room and giving little trouble apart from watering when the pots threaten to get dry.

  ‘Cottage people and people living in rural villages always seem so clever and so green-fingered about this sort of thing. They keep plants on their window-sills, flourishing for years, without any light or any attention at all, or so it seems. We might all usefully take a tip from the cottagers, and grow more pot-plants to set out of doors during the summer months and to bring indoors as soon as frost threatens, and then just to set them down on a window-sill in a room warmed by an ordinary fire, enough to keep the frost out.

  ‘This is also a suitable time to take cuttings of any favourite shrub to keep up the supply. There is something immensely satisfactory about a nursery of little rooted plants, growing along, waiting to be planted out or given away. They strike most easily in small pots or in a propagating frame, which need be nothing more elaborate than a shallow wooden box with some sheets of glass or a handlight placed over it until the roots have had time to form. You can save yourselves trouble by getting the prepared John Innes Compost for cuttings, supplied by any nurseryman or seedsman, or you can make it for yourselves out of one part loam, two parts peat, and one part sand. This is especially useful for cuttings to be raised under glass, but you will find that many cuttings will root out of doors, if you set them very firmly (this is important) in a shallow trench made by one slice of the spade and filled in with coarse sharp sand. You must not expect every single one of them to respond to this rougher method, but even if you get only twenty-five out of a hundred it is still very much worth while.

  ‘And by the way, a bottle of hormone preparation, such as Seradix A, will go a long way towards helping your cuttings to strike the desirable roots.’

  OUTDOOR SINKS AND TROUGHS

  Miniature gardens and landscapes in troughs and sinks were also very much Vita’s thing. She’d started growing stuff in troughs at Long Barn and carried on doing this increasingly at Sissinghurst. When the buildings and rubbish were cleared soon after their arrival at Sissinghurst in 1930, she had found in the centuries of chaos more things to add to her collection of pots and troughs, which she stored away for later use. For those of us who can’t find such things in our back gardens, you can buy them or make your own copies.

  As Vita says, ‘by sink or trough, we mean either those old-fashioned stone sinks now rejected in favour of glazed porcelain or aluminium; or the stone drinking-troughs with which pigs and cattle were once content before they had heard of concrete. Repudiated now by man and beast, they can be picked up in a house-breaker’s yard for a few shillings.’ That’s sadly not true today, but my parents had a good system of buying a cheap sink and then encasing it with a coating of concrete. Twenty-five years on, one block of concrete has fallen off, but in the main these still look remarkably good. You can paint them with ‘cow tea’ (liquid manure made from a cowpat) or live yoghurt diluted 50:50 with water, and quite quickly they look almost like stone, colonised gradually by mosses and lichens.

  Vita was passionate about this miniature form of rock gardening, and inspired others to do the same:

  ‘Trough gardening is one of the handiest and most intimate forms of gardening, adapted to the large garden or the small, the town garden or the country; and especially to the rheumatic or the sufferers from lumbago, or the merely rather stiff-jointed elderly. The point is that the sink or trough can be raised to waist-level on four little supports of brick or stone, one at each corner, thus obviating all need to stoop and also permitting a close-up view of the small subjects it may have been found desirable to grow. These little things, these precious alpines, these tiny delicate bulbs, demand to be seen very close, almost through a magnifying glass, if their especial quality
is not to be missed. One has to peer right into them. I think the mistake that people often make is to set their sink or trough gardens low on the ground, when half the enjoyment and half the convenience are lost.’

  On the practicalities: ‘you need a big hole for drainage, covered over by a large crock or a broken tile; then a layer of crocks all over the bottom; then some rough stuff, such as fibrous leaf-mould; then the all-important soil. This will have to depend on what you intend to grow. You may, for instance, wish to grow nothing but scree-loving plants, in which case you will obviously fill up your trough with a gritty mixture; or you may wish to grow the peat-lovers, the lime-haters; and here is one of the great advantages of trough-gardening: you can make up the bed to suit any type of plant of your choosing.

  ‘As a general rule,’ she went on, ‘unless you have anything special in mind, it is safe to say that a good rich mixture of loam, leaf-mould, and sharp sand will satisfy most demands. I would implore you, however, to heap the soil-bed as high and deep as you can. Sinks, and even troughs, are apt to be shallow, too shallow, so this fault must be corrected by piling up the soil mixture above the edge-level and keeping it in place with little rocks or stone, otherwise it tends to wash away under heavy rain. These little rocks need not look artificial or pretty-pretty; they are there for the functional purpose of holding the soil up, though at the same time they may contribute to the landscape lay-out of so tiny a garden.’

  All you then need do is choose what plants to grow. It’s miniature gardening, quick and cheap, and good for getting children enthused – and one step up from the miniature tray gardens of the local horticultural show. ‘Fidget is perhaps the right word [for this sort of gardening], for … the sink-gardener is like a jeweller working in precious stones. He makes his designs, trying experiments which he can alter when they fail to satisfy him, if he had the wisdom to keep a few pots in reserve. Out comes the offending colour, and in goes the befitting colour, neatly dropped in without any root disturbance.’