Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  SPRING SCENT

  At Sissinghurst spring is a season of scent. Osmanthus and azara come out early, to pick up the baton as the mahonias and hamamelis tire. Then comes the wafting sweetness of the wallflowers, in large drifts against the south-facing wall of the Cottage Garden, followed by the spicy, exotic perfume of the white wisteria on the Moat Walk.

  Vita wrote at length about the balsam poplar mentioned earlier: ‘The Balsam poplar has now unfolded its very sticky leaf-buds and is scenting the air. It surprises me that this deliciously scented tree should not be more widely grown. It is not too large for even a small garden, and if only our road planners and village beautifiers would plant it in avenues along our new roads, or in clumps round our old village greens, every motorist would surely stop with an inquiring sniff. Smells are as difficult to describe as colours, but I should describe this one as a sweet, strong resin, powerful enough to reach for yards around in the open air and almost too strong to put in a vase in your room.

  ‘Do not allow yourself to be fobbed off, as I foolishly was, by anyone telling you that Populus candicans is as good as Populus balsamifera. It isn’t. You must insist on getting P. balsamifera, alternately known as tacamahac, which I take to be a Red Indian name, for the tree is a native of the United States and Canada.

  ‘P. trichocarpa is also said to be very powerfully scented. If you can get cuttings from a friend’s garden it will save your pocket, for all poplars root very readily from cuttings and will even throw out white worm-like roots in a glass of water. Like all poplars, the balsam-scented tribe grows very rapidly.’

  In early spring, Azara microphylla fills the air with scent from small insignificant flowers amongst evergreen leaves. ‘A very pleasing little shrub or small tree,’ Vita tells us, ‘not often seen in gardens, and has been in flower since the middle of March. It is not at all showy, and most people would pass it by without noticing, unless they happened to catch a whiff of the scent. It is pure vanilla … I would hesitate to recommend it except to gardeners who want something their neighbour probably hasn’t got; but, after all, it is for those gardeners that I write these articles. Gardeners who want something different from the usual, and yet something easy to grow. Azara microphylla is quite easy to grow. It is an evergreen; it has neat little shiny leaves that look as though they had been varnished; and it has this tiny yellow flower which is now spreading its scent over my writing table and into the whole of my room. I sit and sniff. Wafts of vanilla come to me as I write.

  ‘Azara microphylla is a native of Chile … Some authorities say that it is not hardy here in Britain except in the favoured climate of Devon or Cornwall. I don’t believe this. I have got it thriving where I live in Kent, and I have seen a twenty-foot-high tree of it in the rather colder climate of Gloucestershire. So I would say: plant it and risk it.

  ‘It likes to be planted in leaf-mould. It would do well trained on to a wall with a north or west aspect; by which I mean that the early morning sun would not get at it after a frosty night. This is always an important point to remember when you are planting things affected by frost and by the warm morning sun which comes as too great a shock after the chill of the night. Plants must be let down gently. The transition must not be too quick … The borderline tenderness of Azara make it safest to plant in the shelter of a wall.’

  There is a more recent introduction, Azara petiolaris, which smells like microphylla but has a more interesting leaf, which is larger, shiny and with a slight crinkling to its edge.

  ‘Another [wall] shrub I would like to recommend is Osmanthus Delavayi … found by one Father Delavay in Yunnan, southwest China, some sixty years ago. This, also, like the Azara microphylla, has dark green box-like leaves and a scented flower, white, not yellow. It flowers in March and April, and you can cut it and cut it, and the more you cut it the better it grows. It is well worth the attention of gardeners who want something away from the ordinary,’ Vita concludes.

  You need to take care where you plant Osmanthus delavayi too – its flowers can be easily browned in early sun after frost. One that Vita put in still thrives at Sissinghurst on the Big Room wall, and there’s another on the south wing of the front range, clipped around the upstairs windows. And just as she says, west-facing, the flowers never seem to get frosted, and they fill that side of the house, and our bedroom, with spectacular perfume. These should be only very lightly pruned – just dead-headed and tidied – immediately after flowering.

  As Vita would say, you’ve also got to have a good collection of rosemaries. Rosemary played a particular part in her gardening imagination – as something that had strong Elizabethan and Shakespearean associations; but it was also a plant of the fragrant Mediterranean south, and thus a joining up of her love of England with her love of the foreign. She championed the plant, as, odd though it may seem to us, people in the 1940s hardly seemed to know what it was:

  ‘It surprises me always when people fail to recognize the common rosemary. “What is that?” they say, looking at the great dark-green bushes that sprawl so generously over the paths at the entrance to the place where I live. I should have thought that rosemary was one of our most common plants, if only for the sake of its sentimental associations. It was said to have the peculiar property of strengthening the memory, and thus became a symbol of fidelity for lovers. “A sprig of it hath a dumb language,” said Sir Thomas More; and another legend connects it with the age of Our Lord, thirty-three years, after which it stops growing in height but never in width. A romantic plant, yet so oddly, it seems, unknown.’

  It’s well worth seeking out a better than ordinary colour form. Vita loved the darker-blue-flowered Corsican rosemary (R. angustifolius ‘Corsicus’), with ‘bright blue flowers, almost gentian blue’, and a more feathery type of leaf than the usual, as well as the ceanothus-blue ‘Tuscan Blue’.

  ‘There are several different forms of the rosemary,’ Vita writes in In Your Garden Again in September 1951. ‘There is the ordinary bushy type, Rosmarinus officinalis, which can be grown either as a bush or clipped into shape as a hedge. I don’t like it so well as a hedge, because the constant clipping means the loss of the flowers which are half its beauty, but all the same it makes a dense neat hedge if you want one. Do not cut back into the old wood. Then there is the Corsican rosemary, R. angustifolius Corsicus with a more feathery growth of leaf and bright blue flowers, almost gentian blue; it is less tough-looking than the common rosemary, and perhaps not quite so hardy, but so lovely a thing that it well deserves a sheltered corner. It hates cold winds … and there is Tuscan Blue, which, as its introducer Mr. Arnold-Forster remarks, is used for hedges in Tuscany where they are “conspicuous from a distance owing to their ceanothus blue”. His recipe for making it flower well in our country is to shorten the long spikes. I have seen it growing magnificently in Cornwall, trained flat against a wall to a height of quite 10 ft., and I fancy that that would be the safest way to treat it anywhere, save in the mildest climate, with the additional advantage that you could hang some ordinary netting, such as one uses to protect fruit buds later on, as a break against frost and wind. It is very stiff and stately, unlike its soft Corsican cousin, with a leathery texture in its dark green leaves, making a handsome plant even if it cannot be induced to flower as luxuriantly as beneath the Italian sun.

  ‘Most of the rosemaries will flourish anywhere in the sun, preferring a light soil, even a poor sandy stony soil, and will root very easily from cuttings taken off in September, stuck firmly into sand, and left to grow on until next spring when they can be planted out.’

  If you want tons of flower, she adds, ‘nip the stem tips out and then again, pick regular sprigs for the house’.

  When Pam and Sybille arrived at Sissinghurst in 1959, there was already a chance seedling in the Tower steps, one with a darker blue flower than the ordinary, and with more feathery leaves. It was particularly beautiful so they propagated from it, and found it to be less hardy than the ordinary form but more able to st
and our winters than either of the softer southern forms. It was probably a chance seedling of either the Tuscan or Corsican rosemary crossed with the standard variety, and has been preserved and propagated ever since as rosemary ‘Sissinghurst Blue’.

  This rosemary has become one of the emblematic plants of Sissinghurst. You’ll find it around the base of Vita’s Tower, and in spring its ceanothus-blue flowers are matched by those of the Clematis alpina trained to climb up and over the arch and the large-flowered pansies planted in all four bronze Bagatelle urns. This trio of plants and their colour, in contrast to the pink-red terracotta of the brick, are to me one of the most memorable plant combinations at Sissinghurst.

  Vita also loved viburnums, and particularly the fragrant ones such as Viburnum carlcephalum. ‘Have you got Viburnum Carlcephalum? If not, please get it at once. It is a hybrid of Viburnum Carlesii, which we all know and grow, and it is a far better thing. Its head of flower is tighter and denser; its scent is stronger; and its habit is vigorous. My own plant is young and small; but I am told by people who have seen it growing fully developed that it makes a huge bush in course of time. It is one of the most exciting things I have grown for years past; not very exciting as to its colour, which is white flushed with pink in the bud, but most exciting as to its powerful scent. It is flowering now – April–May.’

  On the cusp of spring into summer come the flowers of the lilac, which Vita also relished. Lilac has gone out of favour in recent years and now few nurseries stock more than a few varieties, but – in a way because of this – the forms available for Vita to write about in the 1950s are almost the same as now. As she says, lilac was ‘one of the few old favourites which has been definitely improved in recent years’. But not much has happened since:

  Vita loved lilac, a flowering shrub with excellent scent, which she picked for the house.

  ‘Frankly, the pale mauve type was a washy thing. The newer sorts have gained in colour, size, and scent. I suppose that everyone is by now familiar with the earlier improvements: Souvenir de Louis Spaeth, and Charles Joly, both dark red; or Charles X, deep purple; or Madame Lemoine, double white; none of which is easy to beat. But not everyone, I find, is familiar with the more recent hybrids, carrying truly noble plumes of immense weight: Réaumur, dark red; President Poincaré and Pasteur, both claret; Congo, very dark reddish-purple; Jeanne d’Arc, double white; Mme F. Morel, mauvish pink; Maréchal Foch, red.

  ‘It is most advantageous to cut off the faded flowers, this is really important; they are perfectly hardy; and very long-lived unless they suddenly die back, which sometimes happens.

  ‘The lilac grows grandly. It grows into a great tall treelike shrub, if you allow it to grow without restraint, so tall that after a few years it over-tops our own heads by several yards, so high that we can neither pick the heavy panicle of flower, nor enjoy the scent as we wander round the garden. It is too high out of reach … You should cut your lilacs hard back. Take them right back to a new leaf-bud, and encourage them to break out afresh. Cut out all dead and twiggy wood, opening the centre to receive as much air and light as possible. June/July is the time to perform these surgical operations, just after the flowering; take note to do it without delay. And if you have got any manure available, put it round your lilacs now; they need feeding; they will appreciate a rich mulch. If you haven’t got organic manure, or compost, give them some handfuls of bonemeal or hoof-and-horn, pricking the top-spit lightly with a fork to give them the benefit of a loosened top-soil so that the rain can wash it in. And they like the sun.’

  SUMMER SCENT

  On a hot day, with the York stone baking, the rosemary plants around the entrance radiate their clean, sharp smell. Turn right from the Top Courtyard and you’re into the Rose Garden. Turn left and you’re soon under the Rosa mulliganii in the White Garden – both places memorable for their voluminous scent.

  Lathyrus ‘Painted Lady’ on a hazel tepee.

  No writing on summer scent could exclude sweet peas, which are still grown at Sissinghurst on hazel teepees – in the Rose Garden and in the Cottage Garden in red and orange – as well as in the cutting patch to supply flowers for Vita’s room. The varieties in the Rose Garden are usually the highly scented ‘Painted Lady’ and ‘Matucana’, which is closely related to the original sweet pea – Vita’s favourite – found wild in the hedgerows in Sicily.

  ‘The true Sweet Pea, Lathyrus odoratus, small, hooded, and not remarkable for any beauty of colour,’ she notes, ‘was originally sent from Italy in 1699 by a Father Cupani to Dr. Robert Uvedale, headmaster of the Grammar School at Enfield, Middlesex. Of Father Cupani I know nothing, but Dr. Uvedale, schoolmaster and horticulturist, seems to have been something of a character. He had a fine collection of foreign plants, which after his death in 1722 were sold to Sir Robert Walpole for his garden at Houghton in Norfolk. Of Dr. Uvedale it was said that “his flowers were choice, his stock numerous, and his culture of them very methodical and curious”. Amongst them was the Sweet Pea, native of southern Italy and Sicily, and it is this which I should like to see restored to favour in this country.

  ‘Undoubtedly the [newer] Grandiflora and Spencer hybrids offer a greater range of colour, a greater solidity and length of stalk, and more flower-heads to a stalk, nor can it be said that they lack the fragrance which gives them their popular name. But compared with the fragrance of the humble little wildling they have nothing to boast about in that respect. It must be realized that the wild pea is not showy, in fact its pink and purple are very washy and the individual flowers are small, but they have a certain wistful delicacy of appearance and the scent of even half a dozen in a bunch is astonishing …

  ‘Of course it is no good attempting to grow them on the elaborate system of training one stem up a bean-pole and suppressing all side shoots; they must be left to scramble up twiggy pea-sticks in a tangle and kept entirely for picking, in an unwanted but sunny corner of the kitchen garden.

  ‘At the end of their season they can be left to set their own seed and a supply be thus ensured. I know for a fact that they do set and ripen their seed in this island, for I have seen them doing it in a private garden quite far north, and came away, I am glad to say, with a generous handful which I hope to have growing in my own garden next summer.’

  So Vita wanted the wild sweet pea, but the next-best thing is ‘Cupani’ or the larger-flowered ‘Matucana’. All the sweet peas flowering in our gardens today descend – as she says – from the wild plant brought into cultivation in Sicily in the late seventeenth century. Franciscus Cupani, the Sicilian monk Vita mentions above who in 1699 sent seeds to various institutions and plant collectors including Dr Uvedale, was writing a flora of Sicily.

  From then until 1870 a few new forms appeared; by 1793 the seedsman John Mason of Fleet Street in London had described five varieties in all. There were at that stage only a ‘black’ (probably maroon), purple (probably the ‘Cupani’ wild type), scarlet, white and ‘Painted Lady’, which remains one of the best and most highly scented sweet peas you can grow today.

  Then appeared Henry Eckford, the creator of so many sweet peas that we still grow. He worked as a gardener until the age of sixty-five, then in 1888 set up his own nursery at Wem in Shropshire and dedicated the rest of his life to improving and expanding the small range of sweet peas then available. Eckford achieved two things – greatly increasing the size of the flowers and expanding the colour range. The products of his work are the group of sweet peas called grandiflora, including ‘Matucana’ which is hard to surpass even today.

  Another annual to sow for its perfume is the night-scented stock. ‘May is the time to sow that small, dim-coloured thing, Matthiola bicornis,’ says Vita. ‘I have just sown half an ounce of it all along the pathway at the foot of a yew hedge, and now look forward to some warm evening when the pale barn-owl is ranging over the orchard and the strong scent of the little stock surprises me as I go. This is anticipating the summer, when only recently snow lay upon the gr
ound, but this modest little annual is so easily forgotten that a prod of reminder should not come amiss. If you mix the seed with the seed of Virginian stock, you will get a little colour in the daytime as well as the scent after dusk.’

  You could never have a summer garden where scent was central without including as many roses as possible. They played a major part in Vita’s summer garden. She loved them for the structure and abundance that they quickly gave her, and had many favourite varieties playing that role in her design. She also singles out a few particular roses for the magnificence of their scent.

  In the list of her select few she includes a ‘hedge of hybrid musk roses, especially Penelope’, ‘some bushes of the rugosa rose, Blanc double de Coubert’and ‘a hedge of sweetbriar’ – all front runners, which we should all seriously think of adding to our gardens. She writes:

  Rosa ‘Penelope’.

  ‘Someone has been pleading with me to put in a good word for sweet-briar. I do so most willingly, for a hedge of sweet-briar is one of the most desirable things in any garden.

  ‘It is thorny enough to keep out intruders, should it be needed as a boundary protection; in early summer it is as pretty as the dog-rose, with its pale pink single flowers; in autumn it turns itself into a sheer wall of scarlet hips; and on moist muggy evenings after rain the scent is really and truly strong in the ambient air. You do not need to crush a leaf between your fingers to provoke the scent: it swells out towards you of its own accord, as you walk past, like a great sail filling suddenly with a breeze off those Spice Islands which Columbus hoped to find.