The White Garden-Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent | © National Trust Images/John Mill
On one of our less structured trips, in the old days of 2018, Dave and I landed at Heathrow, picked up the car and started off to climes unknown and no real plan. We started at Chartwell, that dream of a Churchillian Tudor pile and after hours walking the house and grounds were advised to visit Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent.
Considered one of the most famous and influential gardens in the world, how could we do otherwise and it was off to Vita's place. Vita Sackville-West , (of Bloomsbury fame-along with Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forester, T. S. Eliot and Vanessa Bell)
Sissinghurst is a delight, a small paradise of collective color. We were captivated as every garden room is a revelation, not only Vita applied the modernist ideas of the Bloomsbury Group not only to her gardening but to her writing. It is an enchanted place. The gardening was an avocation for Vita, at best, and yet, she grasped hold of her gardens and made them her own. She was an innovator. She write a column for The Observor from 1946 to 1957 that is filled useful bits that any gardener would love.
Her rich contribution to gardening can be divided into three different stages of her life and three different properties. In the first year of their marriage, she and her husband, Harold Nicolson lived, in a house on a hillside in Constantinople. The luxuriance of its long-abandoned garden, bathed in rose-pink Turkish sunlight, dazzled Vita even in its abandoned state. "They grew pomegranate, quince and fig trees, vines, roses and naturalized carpets of bulbs. Chinese Rosa Banksiae twined through lilac bushes, cyclamen formed bright tussocks beneath the fruit trees." Be still my heart. The only character missing is the snake!
Given the Mediterranean climate of Constantinople, which makes all gardens look good, Vita plopped plants in the ground and created Eden.
Below is a precious gift of Nigel Nicholson, who stated this poem refers to the first garden she created for the Constantinople [Istanbul] garden…’We had a garden on a hill’.
"For Vita, this natural exuberance perfectly matched her own soaring spirits. This sense of a garden as a repository of joy, first glimpsed abroad, perfected in the early years at Long Barn and celebrated in her poem, The Garden, would remain with her lifelong."
(Matthew Dennison, author of Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West)
In 1915, Vita and Harold bought Long Barn near her ancestral home, Knole in Kent.
On their return to England in 1915, with WWI raging on the not so distant horizon, the young couple bought Long Barn, a ‘untidy and tinkly’ medieval house with Tudor additions. There they established that vision of English manor house gardening as they beginning with a clump of primroses, dug up in a nearby wood and transplanted to one of Long Barn’s sloping banks.
"Vita’s first plantings were overtly traditional. After her visit to Gertrude Jekyll, whom she described as ‘rather fat, and rather grumbly’, she planned a rigorously yellow and white scheme for part of the garden and planted a host of climbing roses: American Pillar, La Guirlande, W A Richardson, Albéric Barbier, Gloire de Dijon and Madame Alfred Carrière." That sounds like a Jekyll recommendation, "fat and grumby" though she may have been, the woman knew her way around a rose bush
Madame Alfred Carrière
Vita and Harold cut their hoes through this 3 acres garden and restored the collection of neglected Tudor buildings along with its farmland. Harold set the form of "garden rooms." It was a trail and error operation and the proving ground for their next endeavor. You can visit by requesting a private tour. There are also some wonderful morning gardening classes provided by the present owners.
Least we forget, first and foremost, Vita was a writer and poet, not a professional gardener, but her planting and originality are a hallmark of this garden. we have to imagine the gardens as her restoration and reclusive retreat after hours of writing, among other interests. They stayed from 1915 to 1930. I wonder if the Muses Euterpe (lyric poetry), and Erato (poems) visited her in this idyllic place?
She wrote in her diary, ‘I thank God I have known absolute happiness’. Her happiness consisted of her husband Harold, their first child Benedict and, for the first time in Vita’s life, her garden.
The poem is typical of Vita’s early verse, with its regular meter and rhyme scheme and suggestion of escapism. Charm and sincerity balance any lack of profundity or formal experimentalism.
For Vita, writing in the first ecstatic months at Long Barn, when the sun apparently shone unbroken and she looked forward to the birth of her second child in September (with no foreshadowing of the stillbirth that lay ahead of her) love was indeed what really grew."
Vita and Harold created a garden that would be a tribute to their love and a visible expression of their personalities. It is inconceivable to consider this parallel Eden existing so near the terror of the trenches of France.
Long Barn
So moved was she by her first essays in gardening at Long Barn that she wrote this poem, called simply ‘The Garden’. An amended version was published two years later in ‘Poems of West and East’ (1917).ved was she by her first essays in gardening at Long Barn that she wrote this poem, called simply ‘The Garden’. An amended version was published two years later in ‘Poems of West and East’ (1917).
Lover of woods, of words, of flowers,
Lover yourself of the things I love,
Friendship was made of the quiet hours
Hung between earth and the sky above.
Vita ( Victoria ) Sackville-West was the daughter of the 3rd Baron Sackville. She was born in 1892 at Knole House in Kent. Ah, yes, Knole House. I can not resist the telling of her fate in relationship to her childhood home, the setting for 17 of Virigina Woolf's novels, including the famed, Orlando, a story for another day.
Vita was heartbroken to lose the house to a lesser male relative only to lose it again, when in 1946, it was bequeathed to the National Trust.
Poor Vita. as she recalls, "It's silly to mind, I know, but I do mind... Why should stones and rooms and shapes of courtyards matter so poignantly?" acknowledging the futility of forming a sentimental attachment to a building. Good girl...she moved on. It is a lesson to us all. She and Harold bought Sissinghurst in 1930. She fell in mad love with a Tudor property. It was the wing of a Tudor house, a strange set up, really like living within the ruin. I think her grandchildren still live on one side of the wing. The rest is long gone. It has that folly feel to it as though it was designed as a ruin intentionally. They spent the next 30 years creating a garden that would be a collaboration of all they had come to learn about gardening.
Sissinghurst
They wanted the garden to have not only a formal structure with extensive views, but provide a sense of privacy and intimacy. This was achieved by dividing the garden into separate enclosures, creating the now famous White Garden, Rose Garden, Orchard, Cottage Garden and Nuttery.
The garden was restored after World War II, (the National Trust cleared away centuries of debris and revealed the gardens to their fullest viewing capacity. Sissinghurst has enjoyed a steady stream of visitors since then.
Let me share some basic truths that Vita would want you to know:
Be ruthless. If it does not work, change it.
Don't be too tidy in a garden, let self-seeded plants grow where they naturally fall, wild flowers mixing with cultivated plants in a garden is not a disaster.
Have an architectural plan, a color plan and a seasonal plan.
(I mentioned the architectural plan to Dave and he looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. However, the "not too tidy" part grabbed his attention.)
Sackville-West's finest achievement was the creation of the one-color gardens. This she created by relating groups of plants in mass and height and trying colors against each other until satisfied with the right combination, a culmination of her experimentation at Long Barn.
Now acclaimed as the embodiment of modern British gardening tradition, her legacy is the a haven of peace and beauty.
She filled the formal structure of garden rooms and vistas with romantic, billowing planting. Vita also defined color schemes including the White Garden, which has inspired thousands of imitations.
Vita's joy of living and loving is captured in that sublime garden that wraps itself around the viewer and touches the gardening hearts of all who have the beautiful opportunity to see it.
Vita wrote this love letter to Harold but she could be writing to the garden....
"I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don't really resent it." She was in love with her garden...me, too.
Lady with the Red Hat-Vita Sackville-West
by William Strang, British painter, illustrator and writer
A wonderful account of beautiful lush places !