Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  Such speculations are possibly not worth pursuing, and the psychoanalysts, indeed, definitely disapprove of daydreams; they give them a terrible name, uncoordinated thought or something like that, and tell us to practise a useful concentration. But the truth is that the adventures which happen in the mind are more dangerous and important than those which happen outwardly in the open air; they have a habit of fermenting, and all sorts of toadstools sprout in the half-light of our underground cellars. Shall we then listen to the psychoanalysts and their warnings? The toadstools have their beauty. Scarlet, speckled, grotesque, they glow in the obscure corners. It is not safe to explore underground: you do not know what you may meet.

  There was an adventure which happened to me once, and which, although it will lose everything in the telling, I will tell. It did not take place among houses and advertisements, and those who saw me pale with terror—those, that is, who saw the effect without having shared the experience—laughed at me in a kindly way. I was annoyed that they should have found me out, for what had happened concerned me and me only, but there was no help for it—my looks had betrayed. Had I seen a ghost? No, I had seen nothing so palpable as a ghost; I had in fact seen nothing at all; I had only felt. I was careful not to tell them this; I simply said that I felt ill and wanted air. So I did. But what I wanted most was time to absorb something which I already knew I should never forget.

  The place was an old Italian castle, situated down in a valley among cypresses. The slopes of the hills, in rough terraces, were covered with vines; and as the month was October the leaves had turned to a brilliant red, so that the hillside in the level rays of the sinking sun appeared to be on fire. It was a remote place in the country, a deep bowl of a place, scooped in the hills; and that old castle, among the black trees, scarcely visible, seemed to be trying to burrow its way even more deeply into the heart of the earth. I am not saying that it was sinister, for it was not; only it was like a great piece of rock that had got lodged among the cypresses at the bottom; that had rolled itself down from the top of the hills and would have liked to go deeper had the earth not stopped it. There were no other dwellings within sight; it was alone with the red vines and the black cypresses and the circle of blue sky overhead; nor could it rightly be called a dwelling, for the peasants used it only during the daytime and deserted it for the night when their labour was done. It was deserted when we came to it, but the great gate was open to a push in the thoughtless trusting way of remote country districts, and our footsteps rang unchallenged on the stones of the inner courtyard. We penetrated into the rooms; they were put to purely useful uses; hung with grapes, that is to say, grapes that were not to be pressed into wine, but dried into raisins, so that they were hung, bunch after bunch, along osier wands where the maximum of sunlight would strike upon them. Even now the afternoon sun was on them, making them transparent as they hung, the veinings and even the pips visible, as the veins of a hand held against the fire. We exclaimed, and thought them lovely. But there were deeper recesses within the castle: a flight of stone steps, leading down, less attractive than the old banqueting rooms hung with grapes, but more attractive because more mysterious, less obvious, more frightening. I slipped away and went down alone.

  Upstairs I left the courtyard, with the late sun striking into it, and the voices of my friends; the steps led me down into an increasing darkness, so that I reached out my hand to touch the wall lest I should stumble. I could just see that the bottom of the steps opened out into a cellar. There was a gleam of light from a cobwebbed window opposite. A dim aroma came up to me, but I thought nothing of it, and trod light-heartedly down into the cellar, and stood there among the enormous barrels, like vats, ranged on either side of the vault. I stood there, pleased to be alone in that queer place, looking at the vats, and snuffing the curiously scented air. I did not at first understand how insidious the scent was; at first, it was sweet and heavy, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but just different from anything I had ever smelt before. I snuffed it, interested, as one might play with a new idea. I was down there, I suppose, for two minutes before I was overcome. I had not realised that the barrels were full to the brim with fermenting juice. Even as I was seized with panic—panic in the classical sense of the word, panic in the sense of a spirit sprung from nature and stronger than myself—I did not realise it. I knew only that I must reach the air or I should fall. Blindly I turned and staggered for the steps, gasping for air, gasping above all for sanity, struggling to escape the cellar where such irresistible forces had nearly taken possession of me. I reached the top, and the hands of my friends pulled me into the light.

  But what I still want to know is, what happened to Mary Jones and Mr. Whalley when they went down into the darker places?

  FROM A JOY OF GARDENING (1958)

  It is widely agreed that Vita’s writing and talks on the art of gardening, along with her travel writing, count among her best works. Her involvement in and knowledge of the many aspects of choice: what goes with what and why, and care: how to best control and tend, are in full evidence. She waxes lyrical, plays with nomenclature, and demonstrates a complete scale of emotions in relation to this art. Included here is a reflection on sight and colors, in which a pair of amber-colored spectacles intensify the vision, and remind us of the rose-colored spectacles that give rise to the plot of her novella Seducers in Ecuador.

  These musings are divided by seasons: “Lilacs of loose delicacy,” in the Autumn selection, begins with a rousing introduction: “In the last-minute scramble to order the shrubs we had made note of in those far-away happy months of May and June, and have since forgotten, let us now remember the Preston lilacs, Syringa prestoniae, before it is too late.” There is often a sense of urgency in her tone and subject. Often it is called upon to discuss how to redeem various neglected gardens; she takes those “redemptions” seriously. “Good gardeners take trouble,” she entitles one of her essays, distinguishing between “most of us amateur gardeners,” and good gardeners, those who know their job. She knows the job of writing, as of gardening, despite her modesty.

  In her “French Idea of Gardening,” Vita draws a horrific contrast between the charm of the villages with their pots of flowers in the street and the ghastly formal public gardens with the names of towns spelled out in flowers. In her reflection on Alpines, she counsels on the varied heights at which certain flowers and bushes should be planted, according to the landscape. Here, as elsewhere, she shows an abounding curiosity about small details, such as the items in a catalog. Her strong advocacy in simplicity in everything has no feeling of outdatedness; rather, like her own carefully tended garden at Sissinghurst, it is of lasting value. She is perhaps at her verbal best in these garden variety of reflections.

  A JOY OF GARDENING

  Summer

  Full-bosomed trollop of a rose

  The other day I encountered a gentleman wearing amber-colored spectacles. He was kind enough to say that I had a well-chosen range of color in my garden. I expressed some surprise at this, since it was obvious that he could not be seeing any colors in their true color, but must be seeing them in some fantastic alteration of tincture. Yes, he said, of course I do; it amuses me; try my glasses on, he said; look at your roses; look also at your brown-tiled roofs; look at the clouds in the sky. Look, he said, handing them to me. I looked, and was instantly transferred into a different world. A volcanic eruption, or possibly an earthquake, seemed imminent. Alarming, perhaps, but how strange, how magical.

  Everything had become intensified. All the greens of turf or trees had deepened. All the blues were cut out, or turned to a blackish brown. The whites turned to a rich buttercup yellow. The most extraordinary effect of all was when you switched over to the pink variations of color. There has been some correspondence in the press recently about that old favorite rose, Zéphyrine Drouhin. Dear though she was to me, perfect in scent, vigorous in growth, magnificent in floraison (a lovely and expressive word we might well import from French into Engl
ish, since we seem to have no equivalent in our language), and so kindly and obliging in having no thorns, never a cross word or a scratch as one picked her—dear though she was, I say, I had always deplored the crude pink of her complexion. It was her only fault. Seen through the magic glasses, she turned into a copper orange; burnished; incredible.

  Zéphyrine Drouhin has a romantic history, worthy of her breeze-like name. She derives from a hybrid found growing in 1817 in a hedge of roses in the Ile de Bourbon, now called Réunion, off the cast coast of Africa. This hybrid became the parent of the whole race of Bourbon roses, which in their turn have given rise to the modern roses we call Hybrid Perpetuals and Hybrid Teas. This is putting it very briefly, and seems to bear no relation to the great pink bush flowering in the summer garden under the name Zéphyrine Drouhin. Who was Zéphyrine? Who was Monsieur Drouhin? These are questions I cannot answer. They sound like characters in a novel by Flaubert. I know only that this gentle, thornless, full-bosomed, generous trollop of a rose turned into a fabulous flaming bush under the sorcery of the tinted glasses.

  Autumn

  The French idea of gardening

  I have recently returned from a wandering holiday in southwestern France, and have been observing with interest the French idea of gardening, as compared with our own. I do not mean the grand formal gardens in the style of Le Nôtre, at which the French with their wonderful sense of architectural symmetry excelled, but the public gardens and the efforts of villagers along the roads.

  The villagers produce an altogether charming effect, comparable with our own cottage gardens at home. The village street is lined with pots, standing grouped around the doorways or rising step by step up the outside staircase when there is one, pots filled with pink geraniums, zinnias, begonias, nasturtiums, carnations, marigolds, all mixed and gaudy. Clouds of the Heavenly Blue morning glory drape all the little balconies, and the orange trumpet creepers ramble everywhere. Especially enviable are the ancient bushes of hibiscus, which in the southern sunshine flower far more luxuriantly than with us, both the blue one and the red one, and that pretty creamy one with a whiskery maroon blotch on each flower, which is like a chintz, Hibiscus syriacus. They are usually grown as standards, with a huge head smothered in blossom. Nothing could be gayer or lovelier or, in its way, simpler than this garish exuberance of the village street. It is the natural expression of a desire for color, and I wish our own villages would all copy it.

  The public gardens, alas, provide a different story, and bear only too distressing a likeness to many of our own municipal layouts. It seems impossible, even in these days, for the professional municipal gardener to get away from the Victorian and Edwardian passion for bedding-out. Why can he not, in this country, take a hint from the London parks, wellnigh irreproachable in the good taste of their flower arrangements? But no. In France he goes just as bad, and just on the same lines. Horrible lozenges and kidney-shaped and shamrock-shaped beds, laboriously filled with scarlet salvia, cannas, coleus, and nameless monstrosities of variegated foliage; regimental edgings of rosettes like flattened artichokes; vast leaves of not-very happy bananas in the center; and dreadful little conifers stuck meaninglessly about. The French are also very fond of writing the name of the town in lobelia and white alyssum. Such ingenious practices may please children, but they should not please grown-ups.

  Nothing but my intense admiration for the incomparable French taste and civilization could provoke such surprise and dismay. It is all very odd, very odd indeed. One is left wondering why.

  A ribbon of Alpines

  A most pleasing and original suggestion reaches me in a nurseryman’s catalog. It is the sort of suggestion which could provide extra color and interest in a small garden, without taking up too much space and without involving too much labor. It is, simply, the idea of growing low Alpines in a narrow border on both sides of the path running from your gate to your door, or, of course, on both sides or even one side of any path you may find suitable.

  By “low” Alpines I do not mean those plants which occur only on the lower slopes of mountains, a technical term in horticulture, as opposed to the “high” Alpines. I mean flat-growing; close to the ground; the sorts that make little tufts and squabs and cushions and pools of color when in flower, and neat tight bumps of gray or green when the flowers have gone over. The range of choice is wide. Saxifrages, silene, stonecrops, thrift, acaena, androsace, aubretia in moderation, thyme, Achillea argentea, Erinus alpinis, Tunica saxifraga, Bellis Dresden China, sempervivurm or houseleeks, some campanulas such as C. garganica, so easy and self-sowing—the list is endless, and gives scope for much variety.

  I would not restrict it only to the rugs and mats and pillows, but would break its level with some inches of flower stalks, such as the orange Alpine poppy, Papaver alpinum, and some violas such as V. gracilis or V. bosnaica, and some clumps of dianthus such as the Cheddar pink, and even some primroses specially chosen, and any other favorite which may occur to you. This list is not intended to dictate. It is intended only to suggest that a ribbon or band of color, no more than twelve inches wide, might well wend its flat way beside a path in even the most conventional garden.

  But if you had a garden on a slope, in a hilly district, what an opportunity would be yours! Then your flat ribbon would become a rill, a rivulet, a beck, a burn, a brook, pouring crookedly downhill between stones towards the trout-stream flowing along the valley at the bottom. I suppose some people do possess gardens like that. Let those fortunate ones take notice, and, dipping an enormous paint brush into the wealth offered by the autumn catalogs, splash its rainbow result wherever their steps may lead them.

  Lilacs of loose delicacy

  In the last-minute scramble to order the shrubs we had made a note of in those far-away happy months of May and June, and have since forgotten, let us now remember the Preston lilacs, Syringa prestoniae, before it is too late.

  I must confess I don’t know anything about Miss Isabella Preston of Ottawa, beyond her name and her reputation as a hybridizer of lilies and of lilacs (syringae) and the exciting crosses she has made between Syringa villosa and Syringa reflexa. I wish I did know more. She must be one of those great gardeners, a true specialist devoting a whole life to the job—how enviable a decision to take, how wise to concentrate on one subject and to know everything about it instead of scattering little confetti bits of information over a hundred things. Such thoroughness and such privity of knowledge carry one back to medieval dates when leisure was the norm. I picture Miss Preston to myself as a lady in a big straw hat, going round with a packet of labels, a notebook, and a rabbit’s tail tied to a bamboo stick.

  Perhaps this is all wrong, but there can be nothing wrong about my impression of Miss Preston’s lilacs. Elinor is a most beautiful shrub with tall erect panicles of a deep rose color, opening to a paler shade as is the habit of the whole syringa family. Elinor is the only one I have hitherto grown, and can give a personal testimonial to; but Isabella is well spoken of, and so is Hiawatha, reddish purple to start with, and pale rose to end up.

  All the Preston hybrids are said to be strong growers, and are also entirely hardy as one would expect from the harsh climate in which they have been raised. Whether you prefer them to the old garden lilac, in heavy plumes hanging wet with rain, or whether you will reject their looser delicacy in favor of those fat tassels with their faint scent associated with one’s childhood, is for you to say.

  Simplify

  Down in the West Country stands a castle, savage, remote, barbaric, brooding like a frown across the jade-green water meadows towards the hills of Wales. This castle has always preserved its secretive quality. It is nearly 1000 years old. It has played its part in English history. It comes into Shakespeare, an honor accorded to few private dwellings by our national poet:

  How far is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?

  I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire,

  These high wild hills, and rough uneven ways,…

  A
stranger myself in Gloucestershire, I had been asked by the present owner to discuss with him the redemption of the neglected garden. It is not everyone who can dispose of terraces falling away beneath towering walls and buttresses, apparently constructed of porphyry and gold—such is the nature of the local stone—but the problems of taste and upkeep affect all of us, in castle, manor house, cottage, villa, or bungalow. The problems vary in degree, but in principle are the same. What will look right? What colors will agree with the fabric, be it this ruddy rusty splendor of Berkeley or the raw red brick of the housing development? What shall we avoid, and what select? Harmony must be achieved somehow. And, as a last imperative consideration, what will give least trouble in maintenance?

  We have reached the era of simplification in gardening; and, so far as one can ever feel sure about any question of taste, always a dangerous venture, I feel almost sure that we are now traveling along the right lines. We are gradually abolishing the messy little bedding-out system, and are replacing it by generous lawns of our good green turf. We are replacing our bad herbaceous borders, hitherto stuffed with poor specimens of lupine and what-have-you, by flowering shrubs which entail far less work and are far more interesting to grow and to observe.

  There was a terrace at Berkeley, under one of the great walls. It was a wide terrace, and it had been used to provide a herbaceous border. In the old days when many gardeners were employed, staking and weeding, it probably made a good effect. Not so today. “Dig it all up,” we said. “Scrap it. Simplify. Make a broad green walk, quiet and austere, to be mown once a week. And on no account smother the walls with climbers. Whatever there is must be special and choice. Simplify.”

  It is a counsel to be applied to all gardens, whether majestic or modest.

  PART VII

  STORIES