Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  The heavy soil and poor drainage of the Sissinghurst Orchard make this ideal fritillary ground. They have been successful, and have self-sown for decades into robust patches flowering in April and May. That’s where you see them in the wild – in damp, low-lying meadows, particularly in the Thames Valley, where they have self-sown now for millennia. As we’ve seen with other plants, that’s just the look Vita wanted in her garden – damask shadows across her Orchard grass and enough for her to pick whenever she wanted. They only last three or four days in water, but there’s nothing better.

  Show auriculas might be extraordinary, but it is also worth growing the garden forms (see the section on her cold greenhouse for the show varieties, here). As she said, ‘we may have modestly to content ourselves with the outdoor or Alpine Auricula, but we have nothing to complain of, for it is not only the painter’s but also the cottager’s flower. It is indeed one of those flowers which look more like the invention of a miniaturist or of a designer of embroidery, than like a thing which will grow easily and contentedly in one’s own garden. In practical truth it will flourish gratefully given the few conditions it requires: a deep, cool root-run, a light soil with plenty of leaf-mould … a certain amount of shade during the hotter hours of the day, and enough moisture to keep it going. In other words, a west or even a north aspect will suit it well, so long as you do not forget the deep root-run, which has the particular reason that the auricular roots itself deeper and deeper into the earth as it grows older. If you plant it in shallow soil, you will find that the plant hoists itself upwards, away from the ground, eventually raising itself on to a bare, unhappy-looking stem, whereas it really ought to be flattening its leaves against the brown earth, and making rosette after rosette of healthy green. If your auriculas are doing this, you may be sure they are doing well, and you may without hesitation dig them up and divide them as soon as they have ceased flowering, that is to say in May or June, and re-plant the bits you have broken off, to increase your group next year.

  ‘It is well worth trying to raise seedlings from your own seed, for you never know what variation you may get. The seed germinates easily in about ten days or a fortnight; sow it in a sandy compost, barely covering the seed; keep the seedlings in a shady place, in pots if you like, or pricked out on a suitable border till they are big enough to move to their permanent home.’

  Vita was a great one for tulips, the showy ‘parrots’ for picking and the early-flowering, persistent and easy species for the Spring Garden (the Lime Walk) and Cottage Garden, and to include in her wint-pring corner – but it was Tulipa clusiana, the ‘Lady Tulip’, with its painterly quality, that stood out. Look for the white and red ‘Peppermint Stick’ cultivar that Vita writes about, as well as the creamy yellow and red hybrid, T. clusiana ‘Cynthia’. They’re both beautiful.

  ‘[Tulipa clusiana] is familiarly called the Lady Tulip, but always reminds me more of a regiment of little red and white soldiers. Seen growing wild on Mediterranean or Italian slopes, you can imagine a Lilliputian army deployed at its spring manoeuvres. I suppose her alleged femineity is due to her elegance and neatness, with her little white shirt so simply tucked inside her striped jacket, but she is really more like a slender boy, a slim little officer, dressed in a parti-coloured uniform of the Renaissance.

  The Lady tulip – Tulipa clusiana.

  ‘Clusiana is said to have travelled from the Mediterranean to England in 1656 … Her native home will suggest the conditions under which she likes to be grown: a sunny exposure and a light rich soil. If it is a bit gritty, so much the better.’

  On a different scale, but still a plant which rewards close examination, Vita loved the imperial fritillary (Fritillaria imperialis) and grew it in the Cottage Garden, as well as encouraging Harold to have good clumps of it to provide a rhythm down the borders of the Lime Walk. It’s an unusual bulb and, like its relation the lily, is happy with some shade, plus a rich soil with lots of humus and leaf mould. In the right place this fritillary is exceptionally long-lived, its bulbs surviving in the same place for decades. My mother has now had it in the same shady corner of their garden for over fifty years. Recently it has suffered the scourge of the lily beetle, which feeds and breeds on this too.

  Crown Imperial – Fritillaria imperialis.

  ‘It was once my good fortune to come unexpectedly across the Crown Imperial in its native home,’ Vita notes. ‘In a dark, damp ravine in one of the wildest parts of Persia, a river rushed among boulders at the bottom, the overhanging trees turned the greenery almost black, ferns sprouted from every crevice of the mossy rocks, water dripped everywhere, and in the midst of this moist luxuriance I suddenly discerned a group of the noble flower. Its coronet of orange bells glowed like lanterns in the shadows in the mysterious place. The track led me downwards towards the river, so that presently the banks were towering above me, and now the Crown Imperials stood up like torches between the wet rocks, as they had stood April after April in wasteful solitude beside that unfrequented path. The merest chance that I had lost my way had brought me into their retreat; otherwise I should never have surprised them thus. How noble they looked! How well-deserving of their name! Crown Imperial – they did indeed suggest an orange diadem fit to set on the brows of the ruler of an empire. That was a strange experience … Since then, I have grown Crown Imperials at home. They are very handsome, very sturdy, very Gothic …

  ‘Like the other members of its family, the stateliest of them all has the habit of hanging its head, so that you have to turn it up towards you before you can see into it at all. Then and then only will you be able to observe the delicate veining on the pointed petals. It is worth looking into these yellow depths for the sake of the veining alone, especially if you hold it up against the light, when it is revealed in a complete system of veins and capillaries. You will, however, have to pull the petals right back, turning the secretive bell into something like a starry dahlia, before you can see the six little cups, so neatly filled to the brim, not overflowing, with rather watery honey at the base of each petal, against their background of dull purple and bright green. Luckily it does not seem to resent this treatment at all and allows itself to be closed up again into the bell-like shape which is natural to it, with the creamy pollened clapper of its stamens hanging down the middle.

  ‘It always reminds me of the stiff, Gothic-looking flowers one sometimes sees growing along the bottom of a mediaeval tapestry, together with irises and lilies in a fine disregard for season. Grown in a long narrow border, especially at the foot of an old wall of brick or stone, they curiously reproduce this effect. It is worth noting also how well the orange of the flower marries with rosy brick, far better than any of the pink shades which one might more naturally incline to put against it. It is worth noting also that you had better handle the bulbs in gloves for they smell stronger than garlic.

  ‘Note: The disadvantage of this fritillary is that it is apt to come up “blind”, i.e. with leaves and no flower. I noted with interest that this occurred also in its native habitat.’

  SUMMER

  At the end of spring and through the summer, painterly plants tend to get lost in the abundance and colour of the garden in general, but there are still a few that Vita wrote about as cosier garden, desk and greenhouse companions.

  It was the intricate markings of the bearded iris – landing lights for pollinators – as well as their unusual flower shape, petal texture and their intense, spicy exotic scents which for Vita put these in an early-summer class of their own. They are definitely flowers best peered into, nose and all. As she writes, ‘No adjective, however lyrical, can exaggerate the soft magnificence of the moderns [the bearded irises], rivalled only by the texture of Genoese velvet. We have to go back to the Italian Renaissance to produce a flower as soft, as rich, as some of those velvets one used to buy for next to nothing in Venice and Rome, years ago, when one was young and scraps of velvet went cheap. Only the pansy, amongst other flowers, shares this particular quality.<
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  ‘Stately in their bearing, the irises look their best on either side of a flagged path. The grey of the flat stone sets off both their colour and their contrasting height … A straight path gives an effect of regimental parade, which suits the irises, whose leaves suggest uplifted swords.’ (see photograph here.)

  There were lots planted in the Cottage Garden in red, gold and bronze, as well as drifts encouraged to establish themselves in the Rose Garden. Here Vita grew the highly scented mauve ‘Jane Phillips’ as well as some dark velvet purples. The Purple Border and White Garden accommodated them too, with their huge ghostly flowers, pulsing out their scent most strongly at night, when this garden comes into its own.

  The varieties available now are almost all different from the ones Vita could choose from when she was ordering in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but the colour range available is much the same. The petals were less ruffled then, with a straighter edge, more elegant, more refined. Look out for these if you can find them, less fussy than our modern forms. ‘[Irises] are the easiest plants to grow,’ she says. ‘All they ask is a well-drained, sunny place so that their rhizomes may get the best possible baking; a scatter of lime in autumn or in spring; and division every third year.

  ‘It may sound tiresome and laborious to divide plants every third year, but in the case of the iris it is a positive pleasure. It means that they increase so rapidly. Relatively expensive to buy in the first instance, by the end of the second or third year you have so large a clump from a single rhizome that you can break them up, spread them out, and even give them away.

  ‘Dig up the clump, which looks like a cluster of fat brown crayfish, and you will find a number of white roots just beginning to grow. Cut out the centre of the clump, which is the part that has flowered, and retain only the younger side-bits. Replant these, singly, one by one, without burying them under the soil. This sounds easier than it is in practice, for you have to set them firmly in order to prevent them from getting loosened and wobbling about. It is one of those things that expert gardeners cheerfully advise one to do, and then go off leaving one wondering how to do it.

  ‘An old argument concerns the shortening of the leaves. Some people say you shouldn’t; other people say you should. The people who say you should, contend that the newly-planted rhizome runs less risk of being loosened by wind when it has not got a tall fan of leaves to be blown over. I am on the side of the shorteners. I would not cut the leaf down to the base, of course I would not, but I cannot see that it does any harm to cut the leaves half way down, because the top-tips will die off anyhow and turn brown, so there can be no loss of green vegetable nutriment to the root at the bottom, that secret store whence astonishing flowers astonishingly arise.

  ‘The best time to do this is immediately after they have finished flowering – in other words, at the end of June or beginning of July.’

  An abundance of bearded irises as a theme remains at Sissinghurst seventy years on: the May and June Rose Garden in particular is packed with many different varieties, both tall and dwarf. They thrive in its greensand, freely drained soil, of which most of the garden is made. As Vita said herself about the soils in this former vegetable plot, ‘The soil had been cultivated for at least four hundred years and it was not bad soil to start with, being in the main what is geologically called Tunbridge Wells sand: a somewhat misleading name, since it is not sandy, but consisted of a top spit of decently friable loam with a clay bottom, if you were so unwise as to turn up the sub-soil two spits deep.’ The bearded irises plug a gap, filling the garden with lushness after the spring abundance of bulbs, but before the roses have really got going.

  On a different scale, but with their own particular delicacy, you can’t fail to fall for the alliums and eremurus, or foxtail lily. Alliums are much more widely grown now than they were when Vita was gardening; there are so many excellent and non-invasive forms such as ‘Purple Sensation’, christophii and hollandicum now available.

  Allium christophii and Rosa ‘Mayflower’ in the Rose Garden at Sissinghurst.

  Vita writes: ‘Mr. William Robinson, in his classic work The English Flower Garden, was very scornful of the Alliums or ornamental garlics. He said that they were “not of much value in the garden”; that they produced so many little bulblets as to make themselves too numerous; and that they smelt when crushed.

  ‘For once, I must disagree with that eminent authority. I think, on the contrary, that some of the Alliums have a high value in the June garden; far from objecting to a desirable plant making a spreading nuisance of itself, I am only too thankful that it should do so; and as for smelling nasty when crushed – well, who in his senses would wish wantonly to crush his own flowers?

  ‘Allium Rosenbachianum is extremely handsome, four feet tall, with big, rounded lilac heads delicately touched with green. Its leaves, however, are far from handsome, so it should be planted behind something which will conceal them. If you are by nature a hoarder, you can cut down the long stems after the flowers have faded and keep them with their seed-pods for what is known to florists as “interior decoration” throughout the winter [see ideas for Christmas decorations, here].

  ‘Like most of the garlics, they demand a sunny, well-drained situation. Not expensive … for the effect they produce, they get better and better after the first year of planting.

  ‘Allium albo-pilosum, a Persian, my favourite, is lilac in colour, two feet high or so. It’s June-flowering, a native of Turkestan, it comes up in a large mop-sized head of numerous perfectly star-shaped flowers of sheeny lilac, each with a little green button at the centre, on long thin stalks, so that the general effect is of a vast mauve-and-green cobweb, quivering with its own lightness and buoyancy. [They are quite expensive,] … but even a group of six makes a fine show. Quite easy to grow, they prefer a light soil and a sunny place, and may be increased to any extent by the little bulbils which form round the parent bulb, a most economical way of multiplying your stock. They would mix very happily with the blue Allium azureum, sometimes called A. caeruleum, in front of them. These [are cheap] … not quite so tall, and overlap in their flowering season, thus prolonging the display.’

  Eremuri give you a vertical firework display par excellence, and although they’re expensive, they’re worth every penny. On a heavy soil they’re safest lifted after the leaves have begun to die back, but if your soil is freely drained leave them, as Vita says, just where they are. She was fond of them, and had groups planted in the Rose and Cottage Gardens. They have gone from here now as they don’t seem to do well.

  ‘Visitors to June and July flower-shows,’ she notes, ‘may have been surprised, pleased, and puzzled by enormous spikes, six to eight feet in height, which looked something like a giant lupin, but which, on closer inspection, proved to be very different. They were to be seen in various colours: pale yellow, buttercup-yellow, greenish-yellow, white and greenish-white, pink, and a curious fawn-pink which is as hard to describe, because as subtle, as the colour of a chaffinch’s breast.

  Foxtail lilies – Eremurus.

  ‘These were Eremuri, sometimes called the fox-tail lily and sometimes the giant asphodel. They belong, in fact, to the botanical family of the lilies, but, unlike most lilies, they do not grow from a bulb. They grow from a starfish-like root, which is brittle and needs very careful handling when you transplant it. I think this is probably the reason why some people fail to establish the eremurus satisfactorily. It should be moved in the last weeks of September or the first weeks of October, and it should be moved with the least possible delay. The roots should never be allowed to wait, shrivelling, out of the ground. Plant them instantly, as soon as they arrive from the nursery. Spread out the roots, flat, in a rather rich loamy soil, and cover them over with some bracken to protect them from frost during their first winter. Plant them under the shelter of a hedge, if you can; they dislike a strong wind, and the magnificence of their spires will show up better for the backing of a dark hedge. They like lime and sunshine.r />
  ‘Thus established, the fox-tail lily should give increasing delight as the years go by. They get better and better as they grow older and older, throwing up more and more spires of flower from each crown of their star-fish root. I must admit that [they are expensive], but it is a good investment. There are several sorts obtainable: the giant Eremurus robustus, which flowers in June, and then the smaller ones, the Shelford hybrids and the Warei hybrids in their strange colours. Splendid things; torches of pale colour, towering, dwarfing the ordinary little annuals. Aristocrats of the garden, they are well worth [their price].’

  For later in the summer, zinnias have the same sort of quality, with intricate flowers, which one wants to look at close to. Vita adored them, encouraging us to grow a good range of colours, in bold splashes rather than anything too discreet; but interestingly, she always recommended rogueing out the magentas. This was a coarse colour, she felt, which lowered the high zinnia tone.

  Zinnias thrive in hot climates – the best ones I’ve ever seen were sown as a hedge in Sri Lanka – but they do fine here, particularly if sown direct (as she says), so they suffer no root disturbance. Don’t sow too early. Wait even in the south of England until late May, early June.

  Zinnias are no longer to be seen at Sissinghurst, apart from perhaps as a line left in a patch reserved for flowers for cutting, hidden away in the nursery. They may be planted in drifts, the colours mixed together ‘higgledy-piggledy, when they look like those pats of paints squeezed out upon the palette’. This is how they are grown so spectacularly at Great Dixter – and at Sissinghurst they could help with Vita’s overbrimming theme.

  Zinnia ‘Giant Dahlia’.

  ‘The original zinnia, or Zinnia elegans, was introduced into European countries in 1796, and since then has been “improved” into the garden varieties we now know and grow. Many flowers lose by this so-called improvement; the zinnia has gained. Some people call it artificial-looking, and so in a way it is. It looks as though it had been cut out of bits of cardboard ingeniously glued together into the semblance of a flower. It is prim and stiff and arranged and precise, almost geometrically precise, so that many people who prefer the more romantically disorderly flowers reject it just on account of its stiffness and regularity.