‘This method of obtaining lilies for nothing requires a considerable amount of patience, three to four years before you get a bulb old enough to flower, but how rewarding is the result. It also ensures that your bulbs have not been left lying about to dry up, a fatal destiny for any lily. It means also that you are not getting a stock infected by any virus disease; the plants may develop it later on, since no one can guarantee against this, but at least you know that you have started clean.
‘I have found that seeds sown in fairly deep pans will make little bulbs ready to plant out in their second season. The seeds can also be sown in a prepared seed-bed in drills in the open, but pans are more easily controlled, especially in the matter of weeding. Stand them on a floor of ashes to prevent the incursion of undesirable insects.’
Vita was passionate about the empress of all lilies – Cardiocrinum giganteum, the giant Himalayan lily. There is none more extraordinary than this, over ten foot tall and still growing in the magnolia corner in the Lower Courtyard. She wrote at length about it, including it in her book of favourite plants, Some Flowers. They’re a hassle to grow but are magnificent.
‘[If Cardiocrinum] is too splendid to be called vulgar, she is still very decidedly over life-size. Unconsciously, one sets oneself some kind of limit as to what size a flower ought to be, and here is one which exceeds them all. It looks almost as though she had adapted herself to the proportions of her tremendous home. For I suppose that there is no scenery in the world so appallingly majestic as that of the great mountains of Central Asia. Reginald Farrer [plant collector, 1880–1920] found her in Tibet, and any reader of his books will have formed some distant idea of that remote and lonely region, scarcely travelled and practically unmapped, where men are few, but flowers are many, a ravishing population put there as it were to compensate for the rudeness of life, the violence of the climate, and the desolation of the ranges.
Cardiocrinum giganteum.
‘So the Giant Lily, not to be outdone, has matched her stature against the great fissures and precipices and nameless peaks. In an English garden she looks startling indeed, but out there a peculiar fitness must attend her, making of her the worthy and proportionate ornament, sculptural as she is with her long, quiet trumpets and dark, quiet leaves. I do not know to what height she will grow in her native home, but in England she will reach twelve feet without much trouble, and I have heard it said that in Scotland she will reach eighteen.
‘A group of these lilies, seen by twilight or moonlight gleaming under the shadow of a thin wood, is a truly imposing sight. The scent is overpowering, and seems to be the only expression of life vouchsafed by these sentinels which have so strange a quality of stillness…’
Choose them a place with ‘shade and coolness, for the Giant Lily will stand a good deal of both. Then you must dig out a hole two to three feet deep, and fill it with the richest material you can provide in the form of leaf-mould, peat, and rotted manure. This simple recommendation reminds me of the exclamation of a friend: “It seems to me,” she said, “that this lily of yours has all the virtues and only four disadvantages: it is very expensive to buy; the bulb takes three years before it flowers; after flowering once it dies; and you have to bury a dead horse at the bottom of a pit before it will flower at all.”
‘Up to a point, these remarks are true. A bulb of flowering size does cost five shillings, it does then die, and it does demand a lot of feeding. On the other hand, it will produce a number of bulblets which you can grow on for yourself, thus arranging for an inexhaustible stock. The best plan is to buy as many three-year-old bulbs as you can afford, and also some second year bulbs which are cheaper. By the time your second year bulbs have flowered and died, you will have some third year bulbs ready for your own raising, and then you are safe indefinitely.
‘Having then dug your hole in October and filled it up again, you plant the bulbs so shallowly that the tip, or nose, just shows above the surface of the ground. It is wise to throw down some covering of leaves or bracken as a protection against late frosts. It is wise also to put in some tall stakes at the same time as you do the planting, for stakes will be needed, and by ramming them in later on you run the risk of damaging roots or even the bulb itself. When the leaves begin to appear in spring, put down slug-bait for the slugs attack with vigour, and the glossy perfection of the huge leaves is a thing to be jealously guarded. You then wait for June, when you may expect your reward.
‘In the following October, you dig up the old bulb and throw it away, having first carefully saved the bulblets which you will find clustering round it like chicks round a hen.’
As well as an unfurling balsam poplar for spring, an edging of Cheddar pinks for summer was on Vita’s favourite fragrances list – she wrote about them at length, and it’s a good story.
‘Cheddar pink – Dianthus caesius
Mid the squander’d colour
Idling as I lay
Reading the Odyssey
in my rock garden
I espied the cluster’d
Tufts of Cheddar pinks …
‘Robert Bridges was not being quite accurate in his statements on that occasion, however tenderly he may have expressed his sentiments. His Cheddar Pinks did not grow in a rock-garden at all, but in two long bands down either side of a path at his home at Boar’s Hill. At least, that is how I saw them. He may have had them in a rock-garden also, but if so I never saw it. Fortunately for me, the Laureate was not absorbed in the Odyssey that evening, but in an affably hospitable mood was more disposed to exhibit his pinks to an appreciative guest. Dressed in the true Tennysonian tradition in a sort of shepherd’s cloak and large black hat, he had already emerged startlingly from among the rhododendrons – or were they laurels? – to open the gate for me on my arrival, and now proposed to extend his courtesy by taking me round his garden. I was charmed, alarmed, and rather overwhelmed. He was so old, so tall, so handsome, so untidy, so noble. And so childishly pleased with his pinks.
‘They were, indeed, a revelation to me in my ignorance. I had seen them growing wild on the cliffs of the Cheddar Gorge, but had never visualized them massed like this, giving off their scent so warmly to the summer evening. The Laureate marched in all his stateliness between them, pretending to be less pleased than I could see he was. Every now and then he bent his enormous length to pick some, snapping the stalks very delicately with his sensitive fingers, and having collected a generous bunch he offered it to me, solemnly and even ceremoniously, looking at me very hard meanwhile as though he were sizing me up, which again was an alarming experience. “They make a pleasant tussie-mussie,” he said as he gave them, and I saw a twinkle in his eye which seemed to indicate that he was testing me on my reception of the unusual word. I was far too much intimidated to suggest that a tussie-mussie really meant a mixed bunch, so I let it go and just said thank you. Looking back, I think he would have liked me better had I bravely corrected him. He would have been amused. One makes these mistakes when one is young, as I then was, and over-anxious to be polite.
‘Next morning after breakfast he took me into his private room, and read me some passages from the manuscript of a poem he was then writing. He expounded his ideas about its peculiar rhythm in terms so technical as to be completely beyond my comprehension. The poem, when completed, he thought would be called A (or possibly The) Testament of Beauty. Again I was alarmed and overwhelmed. It was altogether too much like being growled at by Lord Tennyson in his later years.
‘Anyhow, he did introduce me to the virtues of the Cheddar Pink, and I immediately ordered a packet of seed and grew it down my own garden path in the same way, not so much from any desire to imitate the Laureate as from a desire to reproduce that same delicious smell on a warm summer evening. And in doing so I learnt from experience a lesson which he had omitted to give me. For two summer seasons my Cheddar Pinks were a great success, and I thought they were going on forever, but, after that, they died out. I investigated indignantly and discovered
that our native pink does die out when planted in ordinary garden soil, i.e. grown down the edge of an herbaceous border as Dr. Bridges was growing it. Its only chance of perennial survival is to live in starvation in a crack of a wall, where it may flourish happily year after year. This does not mean that it cannot be grown down the border path also; it means only that you have to renew your supply by fresh seedlings every alternate year – not an excessive trouble to take, when you remember the grey-green clumps which so agreeably throw up the colours of other flowers, and then the pinks themselves while they are blooming and giving off that special, incomparable smell which for me will always be associated with a June day and the cloaked figure of a beautiful, aged poet.’
For scent, it’s not just the Cheddar pink which is remarkable – the whole dianthus family, whether annual, biennial or perennial, have fantastic scents, with ‘Mrs Sinkins’ famously the most fragrant. This is a great perennial pink, though its flowering season is shorter than many of the modern hybrids and its flowers a bit dishevelled; but even so, in terms of that characteristic clovey fragrance, it still reigns supreme. Vita planted it – and it’s still here – in the White Garden.
‘At this great planting season of the year [Vita was writing in December] we should do well to consider the vast tribe of Pinks, or Dianthus, ‘for there are few plants more charming, traditional, or accommodating. In old kitchen gardens one used to see long strips of Mrs. Sinkins bordering the paths, and what could be more desirable than that ragged old lady heavily scenting the air? She is a very old lady indeed. Some people think she may be as much as 140 years old, though others would make her a mere 80 or so, and say that she had her origin in a workhouse garden at Slough. Whatever the truth about Mrs. Sinkins may be, she appears proudly on the armorial bearings of the borough of Slough, firmly held in the beak of a swan.
Dianthus ‘Mrs Sinkins’, Vita’s favourite English garden pink.
‘… Our native Cheddar Pink, Dianthus caesius, is almost as heavily scented as Mrs. Sinkins herself, and is as easy to grow.
‘This applies to nearly all the pinks. They make few demands. Sun-lovers, they like a well-drained and rather gritty soil; and if you can plant them with a generous supply of mortar rubble they will be as happy as the years are long. This means, of course, that they prefer growing in lime or chalk, an alkaline soil; but they don’t insist on it; they exact so little that they will put up with almost anything except a waterlogged place. They hate that; and will revenge themselves on you by damping off.
‘The only other fault they have, a most endearing fault, revealing an all too generous nature, is that they may flower themselves to death in your service. You must be on the look-out for this, and cut the wealth of flowers hard back to the grey-green clumps, to protect and save them from their own extravagant generosity…’
AUTUMN SCENT
On the cusp from summer into autumn, you have to grow humea, the incense plant, one of my favourite discoveries this year. I read about it in Vita’s writing and then came across plants at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, where they’ve had it all over the house for years from late summer through the autumn. It’s a tender plant from Australia, an exotic-looking thing which stands four foot tall, like a finer, more elegant, cascading seed-head of a dock, not remarkable for its looks. But whenever you brush past it or touch the leaves, it fills the room with an intense, myrrh-like scent reminiscent of a great Byzantine cathedral. At Chatsworth, they use it as a house plant. Vita used it outside in the garden. Take your pick, or do both, but it’s well worth seeking out. We’ve all got to grow it! Vita writes:
‘A plant which I find always arouses a good deal of interest in the summer here is Humea elegans. Visitors walk round sniffing and saying: “What is that curious smell of incense? One might imagine oneself in an Italian cathedral instead of an English garden.” They are quite right, for its other name is the Incense Plant.
‘Eventually they track it down to a six- to eight-foot-tall plant, with large, pointed dark green leaves and a branching spike of feathery cedarwood-coloured flowers. It is neither showy nor conspicuous, and nothing but the scent would lead you to it among its more garish companions, such as the delphiniums; yet it is graceful in its growth and well deserves its adjective elegans. It makes its influence felt in more subtle ways than by a great splash of colour. It steals across the air as potently and pervasively as the sweet-briar on a damp evening. I stick it into odd corners, where people pass, or sit on benches, and pause for a moment before going on their way.
‘A native of Australia, it is not hardy here, and must be treated as a half-hardy biennial sown under glass in early summer, kept away from frost, and planted out in the late half of May or beginning of June. For this reason I cannot advise anyone to grow it who has not the advantage of a frost-proof greenhouse in which to raise it; but those fortunate gardeners who have even a tiny warmed greenhouse might well experiment with a few seeds in a pot: six seeds will give six plants, and six plants will be enough to scent the garden, especially if planted under the windows. It will tolerate half-shade, but the flower develops a richer colour in the sun; in the shade it dims off into exactly the same dingy tan as an old flower-pot. It likes a rich soil; it would love to be fed with liquid manure, and will grow all the better if you have time to give it this extra diet or a handful of Clay’s fertiliser; but if you have not the time – and who has the time to attend to all these extra and special requirements? – it will do adequately well in ordinary garden soil, and will give you all the reward you can reasonably demand.
‘An additional attraction is that the flowering spike will last for at least a year indoors if you cut it off in autumn before the rain has come to sodden it. I kept some sprays of it in a vase for so long that I began to loathe the sight of the thing; it turned dusty long before it started to fade and die; it reminded me of those Everlasting Flowers, the Helichrysums, which are only too everlasting indeed.
‘You can save and ripen your own seed of it by cutting a spray or two and laying it out on sheets of paper in a sunny place …
‘I think I should add a word of caution. Some people appear to be allergic to Humea elegans, which brings them out in a rash which is anything but elegant. (Some primulas have this effect on some people.) It is a chancy danger which I would not wish any reader to incur owing to any fault of mine.
‘A visitor to my garden went off with a plant of it in a pot in his motor-car and not only did he arrive home scratching, but also his dog.’
A final plant that Vita adored for its scent, flowering in the spring, is sweet woodruff. This is delicious, not while flowering but when it’s dried in the autumn – it conjures up the sweet grassiness of newly mown hay. You want to pack lavender-style bags with it and stuff pillows. It has a deeply comforting smell:
‘Some proverbs are piercingly true; some are not true at all; some are half true. One of the half-true ones is the one that says familiarity breeds contempt.
‘Contempt is the wrong word. What we really mean is that we take certain virtues for granted when we live with them day by day. Our appreciation becomes blunted, even as the beautifully sharp blade of the pruning-knife someone gave us as a Christmas present has become blunted by Easter. There are things we grow in our gardens and forget about, and then remember suddenly, as I have just remembered the Sweet Woodruff, that meek, lowly, bright green native of Britain, so easy to grow, so rapid in propagation – every little bit of root will grow and extend itself – keeping weeds down and making a bright green strip or patch wherever you want it.
‘Sweet Woodruff is its pretty English name. Asperula odorata is its Latin name.
‘You can use it in many ways. You can grow it where other plants would not grow, in shade and even under the drip of trees. You can grow it as a covering plant to keep weeds away. Then, in the autumn, you can cut the leaves and dry them and make them into sachets which smell like new-mown grass and have the faculty of retaining their scent for years.
&
nbsp; ‘It is not showy. Its little white flowers make no display, but it is a useful carpeter for blank spaces, and it certainly makes “sweet bags” for hanging in the linen cupboard to discourage the moth or to put under your pillow at night. Take note that it has no scent until it is cut and dried, so do not be disappointed if you walk beside it in the garden and catch no puff of scent as you stroll.’
Part 3
THE SMALLER CANVAS
Vita and Martin, her much-loved Alsatian, in the soon-to-be Rose Garden, 1934.
9
PAINTERLY PLANTS
Vita planted swathes of bearded iris to line the stone paths, which flower to fill the colour gap between the bulbs in spring and the roses of early summer.
Vita was clear on her overall approach to designing her flower borders, and as to which were her favourites among the larger plants, the shrubs and climbers. Now to the more delicate things, the smaller plants she wanted to cram into her garden rooms so as to fill them to overbrimming.
In the early months of the year, she focused on the miniature flowers which weren’t yet squeezed out by the garden’s overall abundance; and she returns to this smaller scale in her plant choices for late autumn and winter. She sought out things which were, as she put it, ‘shy, unobtrusive, demure; this is the way I like my flowers to be; not puffed up as though by a pair of bellows; not shouting for praise from gaping admirers’. And as she wrote in Passenger to Teheran, published in 1926, about a trip she’d made to Iran to visit Harold who was at the embassy there, ‘I like my flowers small and delicate – the taste of all gardeners, as their discrimination increases, dwindles towards the microscopic.’ You can see that from the plants she wrote about with the most affection.
Sissinghurst Page 16
