A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  Yet despite the deadly seriousness of the times, as well as the personal danger, the Nicolsons continued to develop a garden of such quality that it is, even now, considered one of the finest in England.2 Nicolson peppered his diary accounts and letters to his wife with reflections about it.

  11th August, 1940. A lovely clear morning but rather cold. I bathe nonetheless. A great heron flaps away from the lake. The cottage garden is ablaze with yellow and orange and red. A real triumph of gardening. Viti, who is so wise and calm, asks the unspoken question which is in all our minds, ‘How can we possibly win?’3

  2nd September, 1940. Sissinghurst. There is a tremendous raid in the morning and the whole upper air buzzes and zooms with the noise of aeroplanes. There are many fights over our sunlit fields. We go up to see Gwen [his sister] at Horserace and suggest improvements in her garden.4

  17th August, 1941. Do my Spectator article. In the afternoon we go on pleaching the limes.5 It rains dreadfully and we are anxious about the harvest.6

  On 24 September 1942, Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife at a time when they were able to employ just one young gardener, who was exempted from war service on medical grounds, as well as a Land Girl.

  We can’t hope to make [the garden] look very nice except for May, June and July. There is no hope of us being able to make an August or autumn garden. But I think we can struggle along to make it the framework of the perfect garden. I think we should concentrate on increasing what does well. More elaboration of our own stock. Now, all annuals and even biennials involve more work than we, with our present resources, can perform. Cut them out. Away with antirrhinums. But we can legislate for 1946, grow seeds and take cuttings. More forsythia, more magnolia, more kerrya, more fuchsia – all the things that entail comparatively slight trouble and mean beauty in 1946.7

  The garden at Sissinghurst owed a great deal more in its design to the theories of Miss Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson than to those of Christopher Tunnard. It was unashamedly backward-looking, harking back to a more innocent, secure age before the First World War spoiled everybody’s peace of mind. Vita used the sumptuous colours of old roses, which she planted lavishly in very large beds bounded by sheltering yew hedges, put in bright spring bulbs under homely pleached limes and made a cottage-type garden in ‘sunset colours’. It was all beautifully and carefully done.

  Their close friend Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, who lived in Sussex, also tried his best to forget the war when he could. One day, Virginia called to him in the garden to say that Hitler was on the wireless, but he stayed outside planting his irises, declaring that they would be ‘flowering long after [Hitler] is dead’.8

  Margery Allingham was as famous a writer in her day as Vita Sackville-West, and a keen gardener, although not in the Nicolson class. Her garden was certainly a consolation to her. In her memoir of the first two years of the war, The Oaken Heart, she wrote about the day war broke out: ‘I spent much of my childhood alone in a garden, and I have never lost the habit of hanging about in one in times of stress, waiting for a comforting thought. I do not mean anything fancified, of course . . . but I do expect to get in that sanctuary a momentary clarity of mind which will give me a definite lead at least as to the next step in whatever I may be about.’9

  The idea of the garden as a sanctuary against what Vita Sackville-West called ‘a horrid wilderness’ is a very ancient one, dating from a time when gardens with high walls were actual physical refuges from attack from humans or wild animals. The notion of a garden as a metaphorical or psychological sanctuary was one that enjoyed widespread currency during the war.

  Ironically for Margery Allingham and her husband Philip Youngman Carter, living within sight of the Essex coast, the physically protective qualities of the garden were fragile indeed. Yet it still had a part to play in their personal drama. On 10 May 1940, the couple went out into their garden to make plans in case there was an invasion. Pip had been called up and would shortly be leaving home, so they decided that if Margery were ordered to evacuate, she would put a note to say where she was going under the sundial, ‘if it was still there . . .’10 After he left, she pottered around the garden. ‘The situation made me feel self-conscious. I could not pick a few flowers for the house without wondering if it was a waste of time, or, worse, a gesture.’11 Later that month, when invasion really seemed imminent, she recalled how everyone seemed to be working even harder than usual; ‘indeed, it seemed to get more important every day that one should get on with one’s normal routine. Things like doing the washing up and weeding the vegetables and making the beds and cleaning the house seemed vital. It appeared urgent that the meals should be to time and the clocks wound up and even the flowers kept fresh . . . It was the thing to do for the emergency.’12 Doing the washing up had an immediate effect, but weeding the vegetables required the weeder to continue to live in hope that the skies would not come crashing in.

  Margery Allingham and Vita Sackville-West lived in parts of the country that were highly vulnerable to attack – at least until June 1941, when the threat of invasion receded after Germany invaded Russia. So the snatched moments of distraction in the garden must have had a particularly strong savour. But gardening and the garden also proved a powerful and salutary diversion for many others who were not so badly placed. For Mrs Clara Milburn, living in a village a few miles outside Coventry, the garden was where she went for solace and absorption when anxieties threatened to get the better of her. In the early days of June 1940, while waiting to hear whether her ‘missing’ son had survived the Dunkirk evacuation, she went into the garden to work. And when she heard the news on 21 March 1941 that her nephew had been badly injured and his wife killed when a bomb hit their house in Putney, she turned again to her garden. ‘All the afternoon I worked in the garden,’ she wrote, ‘sowing seeds and digging – one just had to be doing.’13 Practical gardening is a constant theme running through her diaries: her almost daily reports of enemy losses and Allied successes are interspersed with accounts of ‘sticking’ the peas or weeding the borders.

  On 15 February 1941 she wrote: ‘This is another of Hitler’s “invasion” dates, but up till 9 p.m. he has not arrived . . . Jack [her husband] sprayed the fruit trees with a cleansing wash and I did another yard or two of pear tree border.’14 And on 1 June that year: ‘I . . . put in the rest of the snaps [snapdragons] after raking out the rest of the tulips in the dining-room bed. I kill all the wireworms, calling them first Hitler, then Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Himmler. One by one they are destroyed, having eaten the life out of some living thing, and so they pay the penalty.’15 There is no doubt that for Clara Milburn, gardening was an extremely important release valve for the tensions she felt, especially when, during nights in 1941, she and her husband had to try to sleep in the air raid shelter in their orchard as the German bombers passed over the house on the way to Coventry and Birmingham.

  Clara Milburn was a regular churchgoer, and the following diary entry, for Sunday 6 October 1940, shows how she conflated her religious and horticultural life together to develop what we would now call a coping strategy. She had been very depressed about her son Alan’s capture and incarceration in a German prisoner-of-war camp, but after she had attended church, she felt better and made a conscious effort to count her blessings:

  And then one’s spirits just had to rise in the garden and one thought of the queer things one was thankful for personally – such varied things as the five tall cypresses on the lawn, so handsome; the bronze green of the yew hedge in the fading light, the colour of colours; a new thumbnail just grown to perfection after nearly a year; the feel of newly-cut hair and the blessing of a permanent wave; one’s good bed; the rain and the sun; autumn colouring; good garden tools and a wickerwork barrow . . . And then for one’s good friends and most of all for the nearest and dearest – and home.16

  Her son, Alan, was imprisoned for nearly five years in camps in Germany and Poland (see Chapter Ten), and the care with which she
committed those parts of his letters which dealt with his burgeoning interest in, and commitment to, vegetable gardening in her diary signifies that the fact was a consolation to her. Mother and son might be forced apart, but they had a common interest to help sustain them.

  Further north, in Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last, the unhappily married wife of a master carpenter, and one of the most assiduous and engaging of all Mass-Observation diarists, described how she tried to keep her anxieties at bay in May 1940. After she had heard the news that France had fallen, she sniffed sal volatile17, splashed her face with water, put on a flower-patterned dress and some make-up and went out into the garden to pick roses to put on the tea table. The effort revived her. She regained her composure and had tea laid by the time her husband came home.

  Nella Last was a member of the ‘respectable’ working class, living in a northern industrial town that was very likely to be bombed. She was not aristocratic like Vita Sackville-West, nor was she literary like Margery Allingham or moneyed and confident like Clara Milburn, but she had a particular gift for simply expressing the kind of comforting domestic thoughts that helped get her, and probably millions of other women like her, through the worst days. And her garden definitely helped. On 14 March 1941, the day after Barrow, which was a shipyard town, came under sustained attack from German bombers, she wrote in her diary:

  My table had boiled eggs [from her own hens], wholemeal bread, damson jam and a little cake cut in small pieces and spread out to look more – all home-made and simple, but my gaily embroidered cloth and bowl garden made it festive. My ‘garden’ is a bowl of moss and ferns off a sheltered wall. Today I stuck four yellow and two white crocuses in the damp moss. The warmth of the room opened them, and they looked like gold and white stars against the deep green moss.18

  At the height of what came to be known as the Barrow Blitz, on 2 May that year, she wrote:

  The garden is wakening rapidly, and I can see signs of blossom buds on my three little apple-trees. I put a lot of water round the roots as last year, in the drought, the blossom withered without setting. I’m keeping my rockery plants alive with constant watering for the sake of the bees, since I want them to come constantly now there are signs of blossom. A blackbird seems to be building nearby – she has been busy with straw all day today – and now the old tree at the bottom of the next-door garden shows buds against the blue sky.

  My husband had a night off from work and said he really must get another row of peas and potatoes in, so I got some mending and ironing done . . .19

  Late the following winter, when prospects still seemed bleak, Nella Last’s reflections echoed those which comforted Clara Milburn:

  Today [Sunday 1 March 1942], when I went down the garden path for a bit of green for my hens, I suddenly saw a little clump of snowdrops, as they shone snow-white from a patch of dirty-grey melting snow. I felt I could have knelt on the wet path in ecstasy to admire their frail brave beauty. There is always such a feeling of a miracle in the first flower or budding tree, and after this dreadful winter, it seemed like a promise to see the wee white things nodding in the wind. Whatever troubles we have to face in the near future will be easier if there is life around. Somehow God and his Goodness seem nearer if there are flowers and leafed trees.20

  In the late 1930s, Britain was a predominantly Christian country and about a third of the population attended church or chapel on a regular basis. There they would have been exposed, in sermons and lessons from the Bible, to a host of garden, gardening and flower images: the garden of Eden, Paradise as a garden, the invocation not to be anxious – ‘Consider the lilies of the field’ – the garden of Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus was laid in the tomb. On Armistice Day every year, the clergy would remember the fallen of the last war lying in the beautiful flowery gardens laid out by the Imperial War Graves Commission, and the way that poppies bloomed in Flanders Field. Taking advantage of this, the Ministry of Agriculture even suggested that clergymen preach on Digging for Victory, ‘enclosing a list of suggested texts with headings on which to base the sermons.’21

  Although the grimly serious and practical gardening contributors to the daily and weekly newspapers rarely wrote in such elevated terms, or expressed themselves so lyrically, they still loved their flowers deeply, and yearned to keep something of the pre-war atmosphere in their gardens.

  Early in the war, The Gardeners’ Chronicle made its view plain. The issue of 23 September 1939 began with the by then customary encouraging, patriotic editorial leader:

  . . . we are fighting to preserve a way of life which already has succeeded in making the world a happier place for many, and will, if preserved, succeed yet more in bringing happiness to everybody capable of enjoying it. It is wise, moreover, to go on not only doing all we can to bring victory nearer, but also to do all we can between while to forget about the war – let the captains and the Kings depart for a little while and the tumult and the shouting die!. . . Therefore next week and onwards we shall continue to write about things of gardening interest in the hope that they may divert the reader from a too constant concentration on war work, for now, more than ever, is the garden ‘a refreshment of the spirit of man’.22

  This was to prove a frequent and enduring theme throughout the war: that gardening offered a valid, respectable, even necessary escape from the anxiety, bone-tiredness and stress which dogged many civilian lives.

  All through the war, contributors to The Gardeners’ Chronicle, such as T. F. Tomalin of Stansted Park and B. Hills of Exbury, continued to submit their effusions on growing indoor grapes or Phalaenopsis orchids, capable to a quite remarkable extent of ignoring the world outside their own small and enclosed domain.

  The ‘Correspondent’ who wrote The Times gardening column on a Saturday likewise managed always to include something about the flower garden. In October 1941 he wrote:

  In southern gardens the decline into winter . . . has been gradual and almost ideal. The days have been mostly calm and the earth has been warm and dry. Autumn flowers have been gayer than usual, and the second display of hybrid roses has made up for the more meagre blooming of the first.

  Now that shrubs that need little attention are doubly precious, growers should concentrate on those roses that make the bravest show in September and October. General McArthur, Ophelia, and Mrs Sam. McGredy, are only three of these, but the others are well known.’23

  He could not then resist shaking his head over the dangers of weeds, like the dreaded willowherb, seeding in the unattended gardens of vacant houses and blowing their seeds hither and thither.

  The pages of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society tell the same story of individuals doing their best both to gain comfort from their gardens and forget the war for a while by writing a well-researched article on a nineteenth-century plant hunter, a monograph of a plant genus, a report of a trial of border carnations, or a description of a Scottish garden.

  Those who lectured to Fellows of the Society also sought to divert their attention away from the war. Dr H. V. Taylor, the Horticultural Commissioner to the Ministry of Agriculture, might have been an architect of the Dig for Victory campaign, but in March 1940 he declared: ‘. . . for the present let the flowerbeds and the lawns continue to give their pleasure. There is little to be had elsewhere. Every work of beauty has been covered up and every street disfigured with horrid sandbags, so everywhere ugliness abounds. The lawns and flowers are needed to correct our perspective and maintain our morale.’24 This must have been music to the Fellows’ ears.

  Against all odds, in 1940 Sir Daniel Hall’s magnum opus, The Genus Tulipa, was published. We have met this polymath before, since he was Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution until 1939, and the RHS’s Editor and Librarian after E. A. Bunyard’s suicide, but he was also a fanatical tulip lover, and this monograph was the result of a lifetime’s study.

  Other RHS-sponsored monographs did not fare so well, having to be shelved due to a shortage of paper
and printing ink until the war was over. To ease the frustration that this caused, a number were published, at least in part, in monthly instalments in the Journal. Sir Frederick Stern’s study of the genus Paeonia (peony) was treated in this way, with a synopsis published in successive months in 1943. It is salutary to reflect that Stern was carefully noting the botanical characteristics of the flowering peonies in his garden, Highdown, which was situated in an old chalk quarry only a few miles from the barbed-wired entanglements along the beach at Worthing, as the ‘little ships’ prepared to sail across the Channel to rescue troops off the Dunkirk beaches in late May 1940.

  Another fist shaken at Fate was the publication during the war of the Horticultural Colour Chart. Its indispensability to plant breeders and selectors resided in the fact that it allowed them correctly and definitively to designate the colour of a flower, for the benefit of nurserymen when describing them in catalogues, and gardeners when deciding whether to buy them. It had a print run of 5,000.

  In its New Year issue of 6 January 1940, The Gardeners’ Chronicle praised the Royal Horticultural Society when reminiscing about the previous year’s Autumn Show at Vincent Square:

  Horticulturists will remember the old year because of the wonderfully bountiful crops of Apples harvested . . . and they will not soon forget that joyous meeting at Westminster when the Royal Horticultural Society held a fine exhibition of flowers, fruits and vegetables. This show, arranged after hostilities created conditions, which led to a cessation of the Society’s activities with regard to public exhibitions and meetings, came as a very welcome surprise. Welcome because it carried an implication of defiance against the pomp and circumstance of war; a demand for peaceful conditions wherein to foster and encourage the science and art of gardening; and a demonstration of the skill and earnestness of cultivators, for both halls were filled with produce of the highest class brought from considerable distances and under many difficulties of time, labour and transport. Because of these things the show was a great surprise to those who were unaware of the patience and quiet determination of gardeners . . . It did everyone good to be there, and probably nothing the RHS has done during recent years has given so much pleasure and brought the Council so many congratulations.25