Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  They first opened the garden to the public for two days in 1938, the entrance fee sixpence in an old tobacco tin, if you noticed it, on an old card table in the entrance arch. There must have been some pent-up demand: eight hundred people came that day. Vita would happily meet and chat to the visitors who accosted her. Harold could be ruder: ‘A dreadful woman bursts in upon us,’ he wrote in his diary of an unexpected photographer from Picture Post. ‘I am very firm. But Viti with her warm-heartedness is weak. She calls it “being polite.” Anyhow I refuse to be photographed, and go off and weed. I am weeding away, grunting under a forsythia, when I realise she is behind me with her camera. All she can have photographed was a large grey-flannel bottom.’

  The family had little to do with the farm. Captain Beale was the farmer, and Vita would negotiate rents with him, or object to his planting ugly crops (which meant everything except corn), and there was an orchard in the present car park. East Enders came down in scores for the hop harvest, and Vita, who, according to my father, ‘thought their squalor romantic’, would go down in the evenings to join their campfires. My father ‘went with her once and they gave us evil-smelling and tasting mugs of tea. Dutifully I drank her mug as well as mine, for she hated any tea, and seeing her mug empty she said “Oh I must have spilled my tea” and they gave her another which surreptitiously I drank too.’

  The Nicolsons were never really a landed family. They had left much of the Sackville grandeur behind. ‘Granpapa Sackville left us his Purdy guns,’ my father wrote, ‘which Vita encouraged Ben to use, but we did only once, when Hadji took one of them, saw a rabbit sitting still on the wood-path, aimed, fired, missed, rabbit didn’t move, missed again, then it loped off, and we laughed with a delight that is still remembered. After that the guns were given to Copper, and he sold them after Vita’s death.’

  The war interrupted progress, and for six years Sissinghurst roughened and thickened. Hay crops were taken off the lawns. Weeds invaded the beds and haystacks were made in the orchard. Vita extended her ownership of the surrounding land, buying Bettenham and Brissenden, trying to buy Hammer Mill, but at £12,000 it was too expensive. Captain Beale organised the Home Guard and a watch was kept on the tower for German parachutists. But the cycle of the year continued; the lumbering wagons brought up the cordwood for her fires; the ‘classic monotony’ of the rural life persisted, heightened and even made perfect by the threat hanging over it. In the autumn of 1940, they watched the fighters in the Battle of Britain, cutting white patterns against the blue of the summer sky, tumbling silently overhead like butterflies. One night, unable to sleep, Vita

  went down to the lake where the black water gave me a sense of deepest peace … the moon gave no reflection into the darkened waters. The only things which gleamed and glowed were the water lilies, whitely resting on the black pool. Taking the boat out, I cut the milky stalks of the lilies in the moonlight and as I did so drifting aeroplanes appeared over the lake, chased by the angular beams of searchlights, now lost, now found again; now roaring out, now silent, traceable only by their green and red lights sliding between the stars. A fox barked at them, like something in a fable. I tried to compose the fable for myself, something which would combine the fox, the lilies, and the white bodies of the young men up there aloft, but nothing neat would come to me …

  Jack Vass, the head gardener and mainstay of Sissinghurst from 1939 onwards, volunteered for the RAF in 1941, saying to Vita as he left: ‘Look after the hedges. We can get the rest back later.’ Dutifully, if a little amateurishly, Harold and Vita clipped the yews and pleached the limes until he returned. Vita knew she couldn’t make Sissinghurst without him. One year he planted 12,000 Dutch bulbs, and in 1946 she prayed to her diary:

  Oh dear kind God, please let Vass live strong and healthy until he is eighty at least, and never let him be tempted away to anyone else’s garden. His keenness is so endless, and nothing is too much trouble. Besides he’s so good looking, so decorative.

  Her long-running gardening column in the Observer from 1947 until 1961 subtly and even surreptitiously, without actually naming Sissinghurst, advertised the garden to the wider world. It was something she longed to put on show. Vita was enthusiastic when the BBC wanted to make a Sissinghurst documentary in the mid-fifties. Harold was not keen on ‘exposing my intimate affections to the public gaze’. But when both of them were first conceiving of the White Garden – and it is scarcely ever remembered that the planting was as much Harold’s as Vita’s idea – it was with a view to what it would look like to the public. ‘I believe that when we scrap the delphiniums,’ he wrote to her on 5 July 1949, ‘we shall find the grey and white garden very beautiful … I want the garden as a whole to be superb in 1951 for the British Fair or Festival, with heaps of overseas visitors, and many will come down by car.’

  Vass finally left in 1957, after he and Vita had argued over something to do with the Sissinghurst Flower Show. He was succeeded by other stopgap gardeners, but Sissinghurst entered a new phase with the arrival in October 1959 of Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger. They remained joint head gardeners until 1990.

  The Sissinghurst they found on their arrival was rough and untended. When Vita interviewed them for the job, she had a hole in her breeches which she held together with her thumb and finger. Vita was in the habit of digging up the odd plant while a visitor was with her and offering it to them, leaving a hole in the flower beds. The glasshouses were full of scraggy and rather shameful plants. In the White Garden, the bricks on the wet ground squelched when you walked on them and water squirted up your trouser leg. The fig trees in the Rose Garden were occupying three-quarters of the flower beds, with no room for flowers. Sibylle Kreutzberger remembers Vita and Harold setting off for a winter cruise in late 1959 and leaving the two new gardeners to tackle the pruning:

  We hacked away for weeks while she was away. There used to be a winter secretary who came in and sent Vita’s post off to wherever they’d gone to. One day this secretary came round the corner and the whole Rose Garden was strewn with branches the thickness of your thigh. ‘I do hope Lady Nicolson hasn’t got second sight,’ she said.

  As Harold had predicted, Vita’s entire inherited fortune poured into the creation and maintenance of Sissinghurst. Even when ill, she continued until 1961 writing her articles for the Observer because she needed the income. Only in her last years did she have to start selling her possessions at auction, some silver and a pair of the bronze Bagatelle urns, of which six now remain in the garden.

  When Vita died in June 1962, she knew that she had created something of lasting value. ‘We have done our best,’ she wrote to Harold in November 1961, ‘and made a garden where none was.’ He survived her by six years, sad and lonely. Visitors would see him sitting on the Tower lawn with the tears running down his cheeks. My father was ‘awed by his desolation’, but when Harold died in 1968, my father also collapsed in tears of a depth he had never known.

  For a week or two after Vita died in the summer of 1962, my father tried to use her room on the first floor of the Tower as his own. But he was haunted. ‘I could not endure it. I ceased to be myself: I became a ghost of her.’ Ever since, it has remained as she left it, carefully curated by the National Trust, packed away in a thousand leaves of tissue paper every winter, carefully revealed every spring, so that visitors can peer in through the metal grille that now fills the doorway, allowing one to look but not to touch.

  My father had been in there only half a dozen times in thirty years, and it is now a shrine, a preserved ensemble, drenched in a peculiar faded, organic, tobacco brown, ‘the verdure brown’, as Vita called it, of a tapestry or an autumn wood. One morning the other day I sat and worked for a few hours at her desk when the garden was closed. Vita’s Sissinghurst remains more present in that room than anywhere outside it. A French blue-brown tapestry, of a pool in a garden, where a pair of swans drifts in the water and oranges hang from the trees in pots, lines the wall in front of me. Looking at it, I
write down the words: ‘a curved arcade of shadowed trees’ and feel the Vita-ism creeping up on me, the ghost, another generation on. On the rough oak desk itself there are ink rings where a bottle tipped or was spilt. There is a photograph of Virginia Woolf, her lover, that long saluki face from which the person, it seems, has withdrawn half an inch below the surface, and is apparent only in the heavy, tented eyes. ‘The human contact others can achieve is not for such as her,’ as Ethel Smyth described Virginia to Vita. Opposite her, there is a photograph of Harold by Karsh, with a cigarette in one hand, a pencil in the other, his curly hair oiled back and on his face half a smile, more in the eyes than the mouth, as if about to speak, the person not sunk into the face, but barely contained within it.

  October 1959, Vita to Harold: ‘I have never told you how much I love you and if you died I should reproach myself saying Why did I never tell him? Why did I never tell him enough?’

  This room is an assembled world. In the drawer of the desk there are amber beads, a screwdriver, a Moroccan dagger in its sheath, a book of matches and some envelopes, a label saying ‘Potentilla Nitida’ and a dried seed pod like a small artichoke. There is nothing thin or refined. Everything is richly itself: the eighteenth-century leather-bound memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier stand beside a selection from Landor. Sticks of sealing wax lie with some pens in a Mexican earthenware tray. There is a small alabaster pot and some tarnished gilt scales on which letters can be weighed. Everything is rich and faded, a fraying of stuff that was once valuable and is now merely treasured. Nothing here was ever renewed. It arrived and, as soon as it arrived, like a picked flower laid on a desk, it began to fade. Vita allowed her possessions to age, silks to wear, wood to darken, terracotta to chip and fail. ‘Her possessions must grow old with her,’ my father wrote. ‘She must be surrounded by evidence of time.’ It was a vision and an aesthetic of gradual withdrawal, the bass line of music in which the high notes were the growing and flowering of the garden around her. In here was the lower register, a kind of melancholy, a saddened music. Sissinghurst as a whole, as Jane Brown wrote, also became one of the ‘crumbling shrines of the ancient garden gods of Florence and Rome’.

  It is a more reflective, slower and deeper place than much of modern Sissinghurst can really allow. On the morning I worked there, trying to understand this place by absorption, osmotically, one of the gardeners, Peter Fifield, was mowing the lawn, and the burr of the mower’s engine and the smell of the grass came up the spiral Tower stairs. I realised, as I never had before, that nowhere has quite the relationship to Sissinghurst that this room does: central and presiding, the onion rings of it spreading out from here, across the garden and the other buildings, the farmyard and the farmhouse, the closer fields, to the woods and the shadowed trenches of the streams. This Tower room is the gravitational middle of all of that but it is also hidden and enfolded, buried in the layers of the place like its heart, a presiding secrecy.

  Inventories have been taken here, and the Trust has carefully numbered every object, book and paper. But you can read this room as more than a catalogue of objects. It is a form of self-portrait. There is a layer of imperial richness here: a chipped lapis tile on which a vase can sit. And another, on the other table, a brown and amber medieval floor tile, made of English clay. On the bookshelf next to her desk, there is The Rhymers Lexicon, in which in pencil on the title page she has written ‘a rhymer, that’s what I am’, and in which many words are ticked as used and not to be used again. Some are added: puerile between peristyle and reconcile; cruelle between coracle and demoiselle.

  In a Venetian notebook there is a letter from Freya Stark, describing the olives and lemon orchards of the Mediterranean scene then spread before her eyes, and a long list, stretching over thirty years, of the books she lent to her children, to her cousin Eddy and Uncle Charlie, to Dottie Wellesley and other lovers, even to her mother. There is a letter written by a woman who loved her, from 17 Montpelier St, SW7, undated:

  Thank you for a very lovely day. I shall long remember the rain sliding on the panes, the chanting fire and your voice coming from a long distance as if suddenly you were speaking to me across the years. An echo – or a warning – I shall probably never know – but thank you for everything

  Madeleine

  There are duplicate order books from the great nurseries for hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, jonquils and narcissi, for tulips, and crocuses, for Iris reticulata and a hundred dark fritillaries. In a secret drawer in one of the wooden cabinets, there is an ivory paper knife in the shape of a tiny shoe. Vita’s grandfather had it made when Pepita, his mistress, died, having the ivory cut to the shape and size of the sole of one of her dancing shoes. Beside it, a small coral brooch is pinned to a photograph of Pepita surrounded by her children. There are photographs here of Victoria’s brother’s children and grandchildren, Vita’s lost Spanish cousins.

  All the English poets are in her writing room, but in the small turret room off it are her gardening books, books of literary criticism and biographies of the poets, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Bergson’s Le Rire, and a shelf of Elizabethan history. Above them is a complete run of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, initialled ‘VN Long Barn’ and with an inscription on the flyleaf from Verlaine in the hand of Violet Trefusis:

  On est fier quelquefois

  Quand on se compare.

  Beside it, in Sex and Character by Otto Weininger (‘VN Polperro July 1918’), Vita underlined: ‘Men who are merely intellectual are insincere. All that they care about is that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well cut stone.’

  Tucked high in one of the rather damp shelves in the turret I found the proofs of her poem ‘The Garden’, which she composed here, at this desk, through the war years, and which was the last poem she wrote. It was her final claim on poetry, in which she had once felt secure, but even then sensed slipping from her. I read it, with the April cold in my fingers and the mower outside, as the thudding ringing of the bell came down from above on the hour. I wanted to redeem what she had written, to find the Sissinghurst music here, but, strangely, and for no want of trying, I could not make her poetry take hold. It lacks the final, unanswerable authority of real poetry. There is an emptiness to the rhetoric and it does not get you by the heart, or the throat. Its lines seem always to be more interested in their form, their appearance, than in what they might mean. Vita’s misfortune was that she was so much greater as a gardener than as a poet. In the end, everything she wrote was nothing compared to what she did in this place. ‘Gardener,’ she calls out at one point in ‘The Garden’, ‘poet unaware/Use your seeds like words.’ Perhaps in those few words there was a moment of knowledge and recognition.

  A life and its griefs are soaked into the fabric of this room. At the foot of one of the bookcases, I found a calfskin attaché case. In it was a note in pencil from my father: ‘These objects and papers were found on VSW’s desk when she died.’ They were mostly the stuff of everyday life, interrupted by illness – she had cancer – and death. Some little notebooks, with lists of what to pack, sachets of photographs of the donkey Abdul, Harold and various women I could not identify. An engagement diary, with dates stretching on into the summer of 1962 beyond her death. A seed packet of Sutton’s wallflowers, ‘Persian Carpet’, 5s. A small note saying ‘Foie de veau veneziana’ and ‘Sultanas in apple pie’. A quote from Xenophon: ‘There is nothing that does not gain in beauty when set out in order’, and a poem by Thom Gunn cut out of the New Statesman. But alongside those daily, transitory things, two others remained from her long distant past, kept here, not in some hidden uninspected repository of a filing cabinet or a drawer but on her present desk, as much to hand as the photographs of Virginia or Harold. First, a letter from my father to his, written in December 1925 when my father was eight and his father had gone to the embassy in Tehran for two years.

  Darling Daddy,

  Last night I felt so sad about you being so long and far away and I crye
d a bit. Oh Daddy I do miss you, it is horrid to think of you all those thousands of miles away, and two years is a long time to wait for a person whome one loves very much which I do you. I love you more than very.

  Gogy [his French governess] has litten the fire in your little sitting room, and I am writing on your desk.

  I hope I will no longer be sad about you,

  Your loving,

  Niggs

  That letter is the only sign of her children in this room. Alongside it, still on her desk nearly forty years after it was written, was its opposite, something a few years older, evidence of another kind of love. Nigel’s little letter is in pencil, carefully corrected by Gogy, neatly tucked into a small, neatly addressed envelope. This other thing is rapidly and even wildly written in heavy black ink in short hurried lines on the back of the telegram forms of the Hotel Windsor in Monte Carlo. It is a poem in French, written by Violet Trefusis at the end of those ‘four wild and radiant months’ between December 1918 and March 1919 when Vita, dressed as Julian, the wounded soldier hero, had lived her life of ecstatic freedom away from the bonds of bourgeois normality, from Harold and the children. But this poem, the passion of its writing still apparent, comes at the end of all that, the moment, or at least one of them, when Vita rejected her most dangerous lover. It is Violet’s admission of defeat, when Vita made her choice for Harold and her family. It marks the moment, one could say, when Sissinghurst became possible. ‘Adieu Mon Ange,’ Violet had written,