Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History
Page 28
By the autumn of 2008, things were looking glum: no farmer; little change in the restaurant; no change in the immediate surroundings of the garden. Then it got worse: although the veg garden was going organic, the conversion of the farm to an organic system was delayed three years; the tenancies of the bed & breakfast and of the farm were separated, as it was thought unlikely that a single couple would be able to do both. As the farm was so small, this meant that the farm would not have a dedicated farmer of its own but would again become part of a larger enterprise. I felt that the idea I had originally proposed was suffering death by a thousand cuts, that the all-important connections between farm, food, restaurant, bed & breakfast, garden, history, land and people were all being neatly snipped one by one. And if the connections were cut, where was the idea? In her poem about Sissinghurst, Vita had written that here, at last, she had found ‘in chain/The castle, and the pasture, and the rose.’ That chain, the vitality of connectedness, was what now seemed to be in danger.
Fiona Reynolds, the director-general and chief executive of the Trust came down to see me and told me that I needed to look at things more optimistically, that it was damaging to morale only to look on the downside and that I was ‘an old Romantic’. After she left, I thought about that phrase and realised that what, from the outside, looked like Romanticism seemed to me like a belief that only something done wholly was valuable. People don’t come to Sissinghurst because it is quite like everywhere else, shaped by the tastes and expectations of everywhere else, but because it is exceptionally itself. Its potential for beauty and richness needs to be entirely understood and made entirely explicit, not buried under a duvet of the average. It needs to embody a completely fulfilled relationship of all its parts. That should be the aim and goal of what was done here now. It might be the motto for this entire project. Nor is that goal merely Romantic in the derogatory sense. As a result of the publicity surrounding the publication of this book in England in the autumn of 2008, an extra 15,000 visitors came to Sissinghurst in those months, spending an average of £10 each. They were drawn by the idea that something courageously different from the norm was being done here. At the beginning of the beautiful and sunny 2009 season, visitor numbers at all National Trust properties were up on average 30 per cent. Sissinghurst, largely as a result of a BBC television series about the project, filmed over the course of 2008 and broadcast in February and March 2009, was up almost 70 per cent. If nothing else, Romanticism is good box office. Vita and Harold saw that. And the wholly done thing, driven to fulfil itself by a powerful and commanding sense of its own value, will always be at the root of the beautiful landscape, the beautiful painting or the beautiful piece of music. Beauty is not based on consensus. Beauty would be impossible without exceptionalism, a denial of the average. It stands out for its own idea of itself. That is not the only ingredient, but it is certainly a necessary part of it.
After Fiona had left, and under her prompting, I made a list of what was good here. There was a lot. The new orchard had been laid out and marked with chestnut stakes from the wood. 636 young fruit trees (cookers, early eaters and cider apples, greengages and Victoria plums, three different sorts of cherry, with a range of fruiting season, and delicious Doyenne du Comice pears, as well as Concorde and Conference pears for cooking) were planted as soon as the weather allowed. Almost a mile of new hedges on the old lines were marked out across the big arable fields, and as soon as the ground dried, the new ditches alongside them were dug and thousands of hedge-plants planted. New water troughs, piped water and new fencing were all put into the permanent pasture. Thirty-five acres of a new streamside hay meadow (on Frogmead, probably a meadow for about a thousand years before it became a hop garden in the 1860s), two new pieces of scrubby woodland, ideal for nightingales and willow-warblers, and a new ‘scrape’, a slightly dished boggy patch by a stream, were designed as a dragonfly- and wader-heaven. On 1 January 2009 the vegetable garden had gone into organic conversion, under the auspices of the Soil Association. New advertisements for the farmer and the B&B, although separate, would at least refer to each other, so that a chance remained that farm and farmhouse would be reconnected. There was a presumption that in 2012/13 the farm would go into organic conversion.
This was the inventory of where, early in 2009, the project stood in relation to its original intentions.
INTENTION 2005
OUTCOME 2009
Meadows
Yes, bigger than envisaged
Orchards
Yes and more planned
Nut orchard
Yes, if small
Beef Cattle
Yes
Sheep
Yes
Vegetable garden
Yes, a great success
Volunteers on the land
Yes
Smaller fields
Yes and others planned
New woods
Yes
New wetlands
Yes
New hedges on old lines
Yes and others planned
Farm supply to restaurant
Yes from veg garden, planned from farm
Restaurant to reflect farm
Yes, partly, but a way to go
Pigs
A good possibility
Chickens
A good possibility
Organic system
Planned, but some hesitations in the air
Farmer as resident
A possibility
B&B as integrated part of farm
A possibility
Dairy Cattle
No (but a micro-dairy remained possible)
Hop garden
No
Redesign of garden surroundings
Not in detail but the atmosphere is changed
‘A place exceptionally itself’
Coming on …
It was a mixed picture, but the feeling here that spring was one of enormous optimism, that the landscape around Sissinghurst was one of possibility. There had not been a snap change, nor should there have been, but something was under way which five years later had the chance of being as deeply and integratedly wonderful as any Romantic could wish. An old friend of my father’s, who had known this place all his life, wrote to me after he had seen what was beginning here, and said, ‘It’s as if we have all been blind for the last forty years.’ Scales were falling from eyes.
One important question remains unaddressed: does this project have any significance beyond itself? Partly, my answer is No. These ideas are about this place, this ecology, human and natural, this particular set of connections between people and place. And that particularity is its virtue.
But the question recurs. Is it not just a private indulgence, an exercise in the unreal, attempting to impose on the real world ideas which belong in a dream or on stage? Is it a masque, a replaying of ‘The Shepherd’s Paradise’? Or an attempt to ‘turn the clock back’, as people have often said, a nostalgic and unreal longing for something that no longer exists?
I passionately believe that it is none of those things, and I will make my case here, but these are questions and criticisms that need answering. Three people have put versions of them to me recently, two in public, the other in private.
First, the journalist Simon Jenkins, now chairman of the National Trust, produced a hybrid objection. On the platform of a meeting we shared in Oxford he said (in a perfectly friendly way) that in promoting these ideas, I was ‘acting out a combination of an eighteenth-century squire and a hippy’. The motives behind this project were both doolally idealist and deeply pre-bourgeois and pre-industrial conservative. ‘Adam has an agrarian vision, wants to return Sissinghurst to the conditions of his childhood in the 1960s. Why should the National Trust do that? Other people, who work there, are just as attached to the highly successful Sissinghurst of the 1980s or 1990s. Why should Adam’s vision of a dream world have priority over any other? Why is his childhood important?’
The second
public objection took one of these elements – the squire line – and played it harder. Charles Moore, a prominent right-wing columnist, neo-liberal and Thatcherite, who was at school and university with me and has been my friend for forty years, saw the Sissinghurst project as little but snob drama. He had watched the beginning of the TV series and reviewed the first programme. ‘It’s the lower middle classes who own England,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph, but Sarah and I, apparently, did not like them. Instead, we had a vision of a world which we controlled.
What emerges at once is that the staff at Sissinghurst do not like what Adam and Sarah want. The chef thinks her idea of lots of home-grown vegetables and less meat might be fine for London, where people like being ‘conned’, but will never do here.
The head-gardener is told by Sarah that she has just destroyed a romantic little corner of the garden in her desire to make everything ‘too perfect’. Perfection, she says through gritted teeth, is exactly what she is trained to provide.
It does not take long to see that the clash is irreconcilable. What she and Adam cannot say – but clearly feel – is that the Sissinghurst restaurant is frightfully common. Even when redone, the floor is too shiny, and there is too much vinegar in the beetroot. The staff use words like ‘condiments’, which make the Nicolsons wince.
The stalwart staff at Sissinghurst hate mess, worry about how to run the place efficiently, and feel unappreciated by the couple. Related to the question of class is one of ownership. To whom does Sissinghurst belong? In law, of course, it belongs to the National Trust. It is a hopeless, soul-destroying quest to try to own what you cannot, and one feels enormous sympathy with the poor, despised Sissinghurst workers. Why should they have all this emotional and dynastic baggage dumped on them? This series illustrates the great argument about who owns England. The answer is, the lower middle classes, the people Kipling called ‘the sons of Martha’. One’s romantic streak may regret this but, in the modern world, our life, liberty and property depend on it.
The first effect of this article was to irritate everyone who works at Sissinghurst. Lower middle class? Who was Charles Moore? And who was he calling the ‘sons of Martha’? Who did he think he was? I was blackened by association, for being his friend. But what could I say in response? There was no way I was dumping emotional or dynastic baggage on anyone. I had been to hundreds of meetings to avoid any dumping. I didn’t want to become any kind of squire here. I had always recognised that none of us would be living here without the National Trust. We lived in an extraordinarily privileged situation. My motive was not any form of control but of partnership. I did not feel that I had any rights over the direction of things at Sissinghurst because of my genes. The only possible justification for raising these ideas was that I had known this place a long time, had thought a great deal about it and the relationships that lay at the root of it and had researched its story carefully. Future directions would benefit from deep roots. Of course we did not despise the people who worked here, nor was I trying to own what I could not. Charles Moore labelled Sarah and me as nostalgic snobs but I cannot think of a single thing we have done which could justify that.
Simon Jenkins had said hippy-squire; Charles Moore had said squire; Oliver Walston said hippy. He is a barley-baron, owns a 2,000-acre intensive arable farm in Cambridgeshire, entirely dependent on chemical fertilisers and pesticides, feeding wheat and oil seed rape into the international commodity markets, and over several decades has been steadily subsidised by the European Union to the tune of some £200,000 a year. When he was a boy eighty people worked on his land. Now he has two employees who drive the giant tractors and the very large Klaas combine harvester (which drinks £700-worth of diesel a day). His job of managing them and the farm, he says, takes up 15 per cent of his time. Much of the rest of it he spends in his charming house in Fleurie, in the Beaujolais, writing brilliant, candid articles for the press which are designed to inflame environmentalists.
In April 2009, I asked him to come to Sissinghurst to look at what we were doing. I also asked Patrick Holden. He is both an organic dairy and carrot farmer in the far west of Wales and Director of the Soil Association, Britain’s leading organic organisation. I asked them both how this tiny farm project stood in relation to the world.
On one thing they were agreed: in global terms, a crisis was approaching. For Patrick, it was
the biggest crisis there has ever been. We are the binge generation. Agriculture has been spending beyond its means for more than a hundred years, treating environmental capital as if it were income. Fossil fuels, minerals, phosphates, water, soil fertility, human skills capital – all that collective capital, much of it laid down by centuries of relatively sustainable farming, has been used up in the last hundred years. We now have an industrial agricultural system which crudely uses ten calories of fossil fuel energy to grow one calorie of food. That is not sustainable and it will only go on as long as there is any environmental capital to exploit. The problem we face is that we have nearly used up the store. And we have exponential world population growth and climate change which is going to shrink the area in which agriculture is possible. The crisis will come in fifteen years if we are lucky. We cannot go on as we have been.
Oliver Walston’s answer was to quote Earl Butz, the 1970s apostle of industrialised farming: ‘Before we go back to organic agriculture, somebody is going to have to decide what 50 million people we are going to let starve.’ Every acre of Walston’s farm grows 16 tonnes of wheat every decade. No organic farmer could approach a third of that yield. That is the wheat problem. If there are going to be 9.5 billion people in the world in 2050, they will need wheat to be grown by efficient, Walston-style chemical and industrial methods. Any other form of farming can be no more than a niche, to satisfy rich, middle-class customers who are keen on wildlife. ‘I am interested in sustaining human beings,’ Oliver said. ‘Patrick is interested in sustaining an agricultural system.’
He admitted, though, that his type of farming was not sustainable. Finite reserves of phosphate, potash and fuel mean that it cannot continue into the future. His answer is what greens call ‘a techno-fix’. Science has come up with solutions in the past. There is no reason to doubt it will again.
For Patrick, the nub of the crisis is in the relationship of energy and fertility. The coming shortages of fossil fuel will need us ‘to switch from the energy capital laid down over the last 150 million years to operating within current solar energy input. And the biggest single change is the switch to generating fertility from solar energy within the farming system. Of course we will need tractors and there will be techno-fixes to fuel them. But we won’t be able to power the growing itself by artificial fertiliser because natural gas is going to run out and the amount of energy required to fix a tonne of nitrogen fertiliser is enormous.’
He described a revolution in the farmed landscape of Britain and the rest of the industrialised world. Cereal production will halve. And as half of all the grain grown in the industrialised world is fed to animals in sheds, most of that form of agriculture will also disappear. It will be the end of intensive poultry and pigs. Dairy cows will return to what they were before the 1960s, not relying on grain but eating grass, ‘dual purpose’ – i.e. dairy calves will make good beef animals. Human diet will have to change. There will be less white meat, although this is not a vegetarian system. In a sustainably farmed Britain, half the land area will be in clover or grass or permanent pasture and the best way to harvest that phase of the rotation is with cattle and sheep. There will be a great deal of red meat, milk and cheese, as well as grass-fed poultry and pigs fed on swill and grass. ‘This is not a question of choice,’ Patrick said. ‘We have got no choice.’
Oliver Walston’s hopes were pinned on a new kind of genetically modified wheat, which has genes from a nitrogen-fixing bean implanted in it so that, as the wheat plant grows, it derives its own nitrogen fertiliser from the air. No need for any artificial fertiliser, no need for any br
eak-crops. It could be GM nitro-wheat year after year, feeding the world.
The question for me was how to connect this giant global agenda to any of the intuitive desires and ideals I had for Sissinghurst. Was there no way in which the plans for Sissinghurst could be seen as more than a first-world luxury, the twenty-first-century Petit Trianon? Was everything I believed about it finally trivial, a form of exterior décor? What about local meaning, I asked them, the particularity of doing particular things in particular places? Did that have no role in their thinking?
Patrick of course thought it did. ‘The old idea was if you wanted to solve the world’s food problems, get a bunch of global leaders together, they will hatch a plan, the G20, trillions of whatever, they will do it top-down and things will be all right. But the really interesting thing is what the bottom-up components of that top-down plan will be. I am thinking about that, driven by selfish motives because unless I make the necessary preparations on my own farm in Wales, when the crunch comes, the food crunch, I am scared that my business will collapse.’
Oliver answered in terms of the market. ‘If I were running Sissinghurst now, I would be growing organic food for the restaurant. The punters can afford it, they will appreciate it and so you should go for it. If I opened a restaurant in Grosvenor Square, I would do the same. If I opened a restaurant in the poorest parts of northern England, I am not sure I would.’
Oliver talked about the changes he had seen since the 1950s, the disappearance of so many farming jobs, the loss of wildlife on his farm, the way in which a farmer would have nothing to do unless he became a tractor driver. Those were real losses, but in no way did he look back to lost halcyon days. They weren’t.