Vita also suggests a vigorous climber such as Clematis montana for a large tree. ‘[It] should soon clothe it to the top; this small-flowered clematis can be had in its white form, or in the pink variety, rubra. The so-called Russian vine, Polygonum baldschuanicum, most rapid of climbers, will go to a height of 20 ft. or more, and is attractive with its feathery plumes of a creamy white. It should scarcely be necessary to emphasize the value of the wisterias for similar purpose.
‘One advantage of this use of climbers for a small garden is the saving of ground space. The soil, however, should be richly made up in the first instance, as the tree-roots will rob it grossly, and will also absorb most of the moisture, so see to it that a newly planted climber does not lack water during its first season, before it has had time to become established and is sending out its own roots far enough or deep enough to get beyond the worst of the parched area.’
VITA’S TOP TREE-CLIMBING ROSES
All three of these roses were planted by Vita in the Orchard and two are still there, but not on trees.
‘Félicité et Perpétue’
‘Commemorating two young women who suffered martyrdom at Carthage in A.D. 205’, Vita recommends this for growing on a tree. On a wall it can get mildew, but on a tree ‘it will grow at least 20 ft. high into the branches, very appropriately, since St. Perpetua was vouchsafed the vision of a wonderful ladder reaching up to heaven’. Vita planted this in the Orchard to climb into a pear tree. The tree has died and a new rose has been planted, but this one is rather too tidily trained over a chestnut frame.
Rosa filipes ‘Kiftsgate’
‘If you want a very vigorous climber, making an incredible length of growth in one season, do try to obtain Rosa filipes,’ Vita urges. ‘It is ideal for growing into an old tree, which it will quickly drape with pale-green dangling trails and clusters of small white yellow-centred flowers. I can only describe the general effect as lacy, with myriads of little golden eyes looking down at you from amongst the lace. This sounds like a fanciful description, of the kind I abhor in other writers on horticultural subjects, but really there are times when one is reduced to such low depths in the struggle to convey the impression one has oneself derived, on some perfect summer evening when everything is breathless, and one just sits, and gazes, and tries to sum up what one is seeing, mixed in with the sounds of a summer night – the young owls hissing in their nest over the cowshed, the bray of a donkey, the plop of an acorn into the pool.
‘Filipes means thread-like, or with thread-like stems, so perhaps my comparison to lace is not so fanciful, after all. Certainly the reticulation of the long strands overhead, clumped with the white clusters, faintly sweet-scented, always makes me think of some frock of faded green, trimmed with Point d’Alençon – or is it Point de Venise that I mean?’
‘Madame Plantier’
‘I am astonished, and even alarmed, by the growth which certain roses will make in the course of a few years. There is one called Madame Plantier, which we planted at the foot of a worthless old apple tree, vaguely hoping that it might cover a few feet of the trunk. Now it is 15 feet high with a girth of 15 yards, tapering towards the top like the waist of a Victorian beauty and pouring down in a vast crinoline stitched all over with its white sweet-scented clusters of flower.
‘Madame Plantier dates back, in fact, to 1835,’ Vita continues, ‘just two years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, so she and the Queen may be said to have grown up together towards the crinolines of their maturity. Queen Victoria is dead, but Madame Plantier still very much alive. I go out to look at her in the moonlight: she gleams, a pear-shaped ghost, contriving to look both matronly and virginal. She has to be tied up round her tree, in long strands, otherwise she would make only a big straggly bush. We have found that the best method is to fix a sort of tripod of bean-poles against the tree and tie the strands to that.’
This was another rose planted in the Orchard to climb into a tree, but Pam and Sybille felt it to be too rampant. It quickly smothered the old apple tree, and itself grew rapidly so huge that it became difficult and very time-consuming to prune. It has collapsed now into a mound of nothing but rose, the remains of the tree buried underneath.
COVER THE GROUND
To achieve the feeling of maximum fullness, Vita crams things at ground level, as well as overhead:
‘The more I prowl round my garden at this time of year, especially during that stolen hour of half-dusk between tea and supper, the more do I become convinced that a great secret of good gardening lies in covering every patch of the ground with some suitable carpeter. Much as I love the chocolate look of the earth in winter, when spring comes back I always feel that I have not done enough, not nearly enough, to plant up the odd corners with little low things that will crawl about, keeping weeds away, and tuck themselves into chinks that would otherwise be devoid of interest or prettiness.
Every patch of ground is covered in the Cottage Garden, 1962.
‘The violets, for instance – I would not despise even our native Viola odorata of the banks and hedgerows, either in its blue or its white form, so well deserving the adjective odorata. And how it spreads, wherever it is happy, so why not let it roam and range as it listeth? (I defy any foreigner to pronounce that word.) There are other violets, more choice than our wildling; the little pink Coeur d’Alsace, or Viola labradorica [still at Sissinghurst, as a carpeter], for instance, which from a few thin roots planted last year is now making huge clumps and bumps of purplish leaf and wine-coloured flower, and is sowing itself all over the place wherever it is wanted or not wanted. It is never not wanted, for it can be lifted and removed to another place, where it will spread at its good will.
‘There are many other carpeters beside the violets, some for sunny places and some for shade. For sunny places the thymes are perhaps unequalled, but the sunny places are never difficult to fill. Shady corners are more likely to worry the gardener trying to follow my advice of cram, cram, cram every chink and cranny. Arenaria balearica loves a dark, damp home, especially if it can be allowed to crawl adhesively over mossy stones. On a dark green mat it produces masses of what must be one of the tiniest flowers, pure white, starry; an easy-going jewel for the right situation. Cotula squalida is much nicer than its name: it is like a miniature fern, and it will spread widely and will help to keep the weeds away.
‘The Acaenas will likewise spread widely, and should do well in shade; they have bronzy-coloured leaves and crawl neatly over their territory. The list of carpeters is endless, and I wish I had enough space to amplify these few suggestions. The one thing I feel sure of is that every odd corner should be packed with something permanent, something of interest and beauty, something tucking itself into something else in the natural way of plants when they sow themselves and combine as we never could combine them with all our skill and knowledge.’
COVER THE PATHS
Apart from the walls, the paths and steps were the main hard structures in each of the garden rooms. They were designed by Harold and laid in the first two or three years after their arrival. They could not always afford the vast expanses of York stone called for, and so in the less prominent paths, away from the entrance and the formal axes and vistas, they sometimes used a mix of materials.
‘Tramplees’ swathing the steps at the northern end of the White Garden.
In the Cottage Garden, Harold designed a scheme using brick with stone; in the Rose Garden, the main path was grass, and the side paths were left as grass, as they had been when this was the kitchen garden; in the Lime Walk the paths were made not just from concrete, but the surprising thing was that they were coloured, a mix of red, yellow and green. That is one of the few mystifying decisions Harold made, the colours luckily fading quite quickly, and the concrete has now been replaced by York stone.
Harold often designed wide sweeps of paths in the knowledge that Vita would soon be covering them with plants, both in between the stones and creeping in from the sides. Vita sets down her thoughts on
the subject:
‘The first essential [for planting in paths] is that it shall be something which does not mind being walked upon. There was once a play called Boots and Doormats, which divided people into two categories: those who liked to trample and those who enjoy being trampled. To-day, in modern jargon, I suppose they would be called tramplers and tramplees; I prefer boots and doormats as an expression of this fundamental truth. Many big boots will walk down a paved path, and there are some meek doormats prepared to put up with such gruff treatment. The creeping thymes really enjoy being walked on, and will crawl and crawl, spreading gradually into rivulets and pools of green, like water slowly trickling, increasing in volume as it goes, until they have filled up all the cracks and crevices. The thymes are the true standby for anybody who wants to carpet a paved path.
‘There are other tramplees also. Pennyroyal does not mind what you do with it, and will give out its minty scent all the better for being bruised underfoot. Cotula squalida … has tiny fern-like leaves, cowering very close down; no flower, but very resistant to hard wear and very easy to grow. All the Acaenas are useful; Acaena Buchananii, a silver-green, or Acaena microphylla, bronze in colour. A pity that such tiny things should have such formidable names, but they are neither difficult to obtain nor to establish.’
Paths and steps almost invisible under carpets of plants at Long Barn.
You can see this in the garden at Long Barn, where all the hard surfaces were almost covered by curtains of rock roses, smaller species of roses, cistus, azaleas and rosemary, swathing the stone or brick from each side. This was a theme which Vita carried on at Sissinghurst and something that contributed hugely to the overall abundant feel of almost every part of the garden. Edwin Smith captures it brilliantly in his photograph of the Cottage Garden, taken in 1962 (see here).
Vita goes further, suggesting ‘filling up the cracks’ in the path or steps ‘with good soil or compost, and sow[ing] seeds quite recklessly. I should not mind how ordinary my candidates were, Royal Blue forget-me-not, pansies, wallflowers, Indian pinks, alyssum Violet Queen, because I should pull up 95 per cent later on, leaving only single specimens here and there. It is not, after all, a flower-bed that we are trying to create. If, however, you think it is a waste of opportunity to sow such ordinary things, there are plenty of low-growing plants of a choicer kind, especially those which dislike excessive damp at the root throughout the winter: this covering of stone would protect them from that. The old-fashioned pinks would make charming tufts: Dad’s Favourite, or Inchmery, or Little Jock, or Susan, or Thomas. The Allwoodii, with their suggestion of chintz and of patchwork quilts, should also succeed under such conditions.’
SELF-SOWING AND PRETEND SELF-SOWING
Allowing self-sowing of favourite annuals and biennials was another essential thread, and very much part of Vita’s cram-cram-cram design. She liked the random appearance of things, which often cropped up in plant combinations that were much better than one would have thought of oneself, as well as the freedom this gave to the feel of a garden – aubrieta, lupins, dill, poppies and thyme all left in the cracks in the paths and steps, or in the edges of the beds, as they came up.
She also liked the abundance self-sowing gave you, the miraculous appearance suddenly of many hundreds of Californian poppies in the cracks of the Lime Walk paths, which she banned the gardeners from weeding out, and she writes about walking round the garden with canes to mark things that popped up, volunteering themselves, which she wanted left just where they were.
Vita also loved to encourage a few select wild flowers to make their home in the garden. Not of course the brutes such as nettles and docks, but she liked to see daisies ‘enamelling’ the lawn. Columbines were always left to seed themselves and the dark-foliaged Viola labradorica, mentioned earlier, was allowed where it would. Both Vita and Harold hated gardens to be over-tamed or over-trimmed. As Anne Scott-James commented, ‘To Vita, Sissinghurst always remained the Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and though she was willing to clear a tangle of a hundred slumbering years she did not want the garden scrubbed clean. It was to be hospitable to wildlings.’
She took this one step further and actually planted seedlings of rosemary and wallflowers into the cracks in the Tower steps and the Moat Walk wall in a random way to make them look as if they were self-sown. There are lots of wild ivy-leaved toadflax in the Sissinghurst walls and some clumps of the yellow-flowered wild corydalis, but Vita wanted to add greater variety.
At Long Barn, on a sloping site, Vita and Harold had created great lengths of terraced walls so as to level it, and inserted Cheddar pinks, lavender, aubrietas, cistus and even species tulips into them, an idea she’d got from the terraced olive groves in southern Spain, adding these things to the walls as they were being built and then hoping they’d self-sow.
‘How envious one feels of the terraced hillsides of the south,’ she writes, ‘for there are few more delightful or satisfactory forms of gardening than dry-wall gardening. Plants can run their roots right back into the cool soil between stones, finding every drop of moisture even in a dry season, and can open their faces to the sun on the wall-front. I write these words in Spain, wishing that I could bring home even one length of the rough walling, probably many hundreds of years old …
‘English people who live in a stone country such as the Cotswolds or the Lake District are fortunate in that they may be able to assemble sufficient stones at little cost. The important thing to remember is that the wall-front should be on a batten, i.e. sloping slightly backwards from the base to the top, and that each stone should be tilted back as it is laid in place, packed with good soil, for you must remember that the soil can never be renewed short of taking the whole wall to pieces. If you can plant as you go, layer by layer, so much the better, for then the roots can be spread out flat instead of ramming them in later on, cramped, constricted, and uncomfortable. This method also enables you to vary the soil according to the requirements of its occupant: peat, or grit, can be added or withheld at will.
‘The top of the wall is full of possibilities. (I am assuming that your dry-wall is a retaining wall, built against a bank.) Not only can you fill it with things like lithospermum or pinks, or that pretty little rosy gypsophila called fratensis, to hang down in beards, on the wall-face, but a number of small bulbs will also enjoy the good drainage and will blow at eye-level where their delicate beauty can best be appreciated.
‘I can think of many small subjects for such a kingdom. The Lady-tulip, Tulipa clusiana, striped pink-and-white like a boiled sweet from the village shop, might survive for many more seasons than is usual in a flat bed. The little Greek tulip orphanidea would also be happy, in fact all the bulbs which in their native countries are accustomed to stony drought all through the summer. The dwarf irises would give colour in the spring, and their grey-green leaves would look tidy all the year round. Ixias, so graceful, for a later flowering. Lavender stoechas, which is all over these Spanish hills, should not damp off as it is apt to do in an ordinary border. This lavender would form agreeable clumps between the bulbs; fairly dwarf, it makes a change from the usual lavenders, such as the deep purple nana atropurpurea. Clip them close, when the flower-spike is going over, to keep them neat and rounded.’
There could not be this range of plants crammed into the walls as if self-sown at Sissinghurst, because the brick-built – rather than stone – walls would not allow it, but it is still very much a theme in the planting style, particularly noticeable on the Moat Walk wall. When the wall was restored in the 1990s the gardeners felt it had been done too perfectly, without any planting holes left. So they carefully picked out small pockets in the brickwork into which they could then plant things.
Every year the perennial wallflower, Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’, is added in small plugs. These are done as cuttings rooted into Jiffy pots, which can then be pressed into the holes, supplementing those that are still there from the year before. For every two, only one takes, and then survives
for about four years. I’m sure Vita would very much approve.
7
FLOWERING SHRUBS
Magnolias framing the view from the White Garden, looking through the Bishop’s Gate.
Vita’s view, certainly as time went on, was that once you have the ‘bones’ of your garden, the walls and hedges, in place, you then need to fill them out in a carefully balanced way, the first layer of flesh almost as planned as the bones themselves. She needed to think about introducing large-scale plants which would give a real sense of architecture, adding another layer to Harold’s design.
In the 1950s Vita wrote about her regrets that she had not got on with more structural planting straight away at Sissinghurst, but as the years went by, more and more large plants were added to the borders, things that would give ‘a sense of substance and solidity’, a topography, some ups and downs, a shape and a rhythm, as well as that all-important feeling of fullness which would carry through even into the winter:
‘It is a truly satisfactory thing to see a garden well schemed and wisely planted. Well schemed are the operative words. Every garden, large or small, ought to be planned from the outset, getting its bones, its skeleton, into the shape that it will preserve all through the year even after the flowers have faded and died away. Then, when all colour has gone, is the moment to revise, to make notes for additions, and even to take the mattock for removals. This is gardening on the large scale, not in details. There can be no rules in so fluid and personal a pursuit, but it is safe to say that a sense of substance and solidity can be achieved only by the presence of an occasional mass breaking the more airy companies of the little flowers.
‘What this mass shall consist of must depend upon many things: upon the soil, the aspect, the colour of neighbouring plants, and above all upon the taste of the owner … The possibilities of variation are manifold, but on the main point one must remain adamant: the alternation between colour and solidity, decoration and architecture, frivolity and seriousness. Every good garden, large or small, must have some architectural quality about it; and, apart from the all-important question of the general lay-out, including hedges, the best way to achieve this imperative effect is by massive lumps of planting.’
Sissinghurst Page 9
