Vita did just this, filling the benches with her favourite painterly plants: ‘[T]he squat pans stuffed with such treasures should be filled in the early autumn,’ she continued. ‘Do not make the mistake I made last year of putting in the crocuses too sparsely. I thought they would look nicer if they had more room to develop, but I was wrong. They need to be crammed tight, as tight as can be, bulb touching bulb, like people squeezed together in a crowd. (I am referring, of course, to the species crocus and their hybrids, not to the ordinary garden variety.)
‘The little irises, on the other hand, the reticulata irises for instance, gain by being given enough space to expand their lovely heads in liberty. Their bulbs should not be set nearer than a couple of inches apart.’
These trays of bulbs gave her the optimistic flavour of spring, somewhere to visit to reconnect with the outside, whatever the weather: ‘Looking back over the nastiest weeks of our late unlamented winter, I try to remember with gratitude the things that gave me pleasure when all was grey and colourless and cold outside. I managed then to keep a few square yards on a shelf or staging in an unheated greenhouse, and those few square yards were crowded with tiny bright things from New Year’s Day to Easter. Their brilliance contrasted with the snow and the leaden skies; it was like coming into an aviary of tropical birds or butterflies, yet they were all easy to grow, nothing odd or recondite, just a few pans of the early species crocus; a pot of Cyclamen coum which flowered so madly I thought it might kill itself by its generosity; a pan-full of grape hyacinths dug up out of the garden; some snowdrops lifted just before they intended to flower; some saxifrages sprouting into miniature nail-head size of flower, hugging close to the tight grey-green rosettes they pinkly star; some early flowering narcissi and jonquils; a pot-plant of the lovely pink camellia Donation; some early primulus, frondosa and marginata var. Linda Pope; a pot of the scented daphnes collina and tangutica; and, bravest and earliest of all, the miniature sky-blue iris histrioides major, which I recommend to everybody, either for indoors or out. It is ideal in an Alpine pan and ideal in a sink or trough.
‘A sprinkling of grey granite or limestone chippings goes a long way towards enhancing the colour and delicacy of the flowers.’
Vita was all for digging up the odd clump of aconites, as we saw earlier. Here she uses them for a different purpose: ‘Another early treasure on a staging under glass is the winter aconite. I somewhat nervously lifted a few clumps from the garden just as they were beginning to hump themselves in their round-shouldered way through the ground before the snow came, and transferred them with a fat ball of soil into a couple of low pans. They do not seem to have minded in the least, and are flowering like little suns, a gay sight on a winter morning. It is remarkable how frost-resistant their soft petals are. There is no heating in that greenhouse, and the pans are frozen solid, yet the golden petals remain untouched and I know that when the snow has cleared away, their garden companions will flaunt regardless of how many degrees may follow after the disappearance of the warm white blanket.’
She also recommends copying a neighbour who ‘digs up clumps of violets from her outdoor garden and has them blooming exuberantly in pots, the small pink violet and the little almost-blue one; and as she takes the trouble to whitewash her pots, instead of leaving them to their normal hideous terra-cotta colour, you may imagine how the flowers gain in beauty as they pour over those blanched containers, white and clean as blancoed tennis-shoes. She digs up clumps of snowdrops and crocuses, and packs them into an ordinary pudding basin.’
Bouvardia ternifolia.
A less well known plant which made it into Vita’s select indoor spring crew was bouvardia. ‘Bridal Wreath’ is a white scented variety, a hybrid of Bouvardia jasminiflora, and she also grew a non-scented pink, both of them slightly easier to grow than their relation stephanotis. Bouvardia flowers – with minimal background heat – under cover in the winter. Vita comments:
‘I was surprised and pleased to come upon an old friend in a florist’s shop. Frankly, it was so long since I had seen it that I had forgotten all about it, and then discovered that it is much less widely grown than it used to be. There seems to be no particular reason for this, since it demands only a temperate greenhouse, is by no means difficult, and is certainly most desirable as a pot-plant. (It does not pick well.) The thing I mean is called Bouvardia.
‘At first sight, you might take it for a tightly compressed bunch of a white jasmine which had been subjected to that iniquitous fashion of dyeing flowers an unnatural colour by standing them in water diluted with the requisite tint of ink. It shares the tubular shape of a jasmine, growing in a corymb or cluster, each individual flower flattening out at the tip to the circular size of a farthing. More fleshy than a jasmine, it looks as though it ought to be as strongly scented as a gardenia or a stephanotis; one’s first impulse is to bury one’s nose, only to meet with disappointment; the waxy appearance is most misleading; the thing has no scent at all.
‘Colour it has, and that is the point of it. How to describe colour in words? If I say cyclamen-pink, or cherry-pink, or Rose du Barry, or Persian red, I may be conveying quite the wrong impression to another person. All I can say is that those bunches of Bouvardia were warming to the heart and eye in contrast with the snow outside. They looked as genial as gleed or embers on a hearth-fire.
‘As a matter of fact, there are three Bouvardias said to be scented: B. humboldtii, B. jasminiflora, and B. longiflora. These are all white. Must we be driven to the conclusion that we cannot exact both scent and colour? Would that be asking too much? For my own part, I think I would forgo the scent in favour of the crammed bunches so softly pink, so deeply roseate, of B. angustifolia or B. triphylla.’
Jasmines, both the unscented, hardy, winter-flowering Jasminum nudiflorum and the tender, highly scented form, Jasminum polyanthum, were high up on Vita’s list of favourites. They would be moved into rooms in the house from the cold greenhouse when they were looking and smelling their best. She liked to have them trained onto a frame to maximise their impact, which also helped prevent their long stems getting into a tangled mess. She writes:
‘I hesitate to insult readers of The Observer by recommending the merits of so well known a plant as the winter-flowering jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum, introduced from China in 1844. We all grow it now. I picked long sprays of it on December 4th and all the buds opened indoors in water, lasting for several weeks. The flowers and buds are not very frost-resistant out of doors; so here is a hint: grow a plant of it in a large pot; leave the pot standing out of doors all summer and autumn; bring the pot indoors in November; train the shoots round some bamboo canes; stand the pot on the floor in a corner of your room; don’t forget to water it; put a large plate or bowl under the pot or your carpet will suffer; and having done all this you may confidently expect a golden fountain for two or three months unaffected by the weather outside.
‘As a rule I try to be practical in these articles, recommending only such plants as can be grown with some hope of success by the amateur gardener having no advantage of glass or any similar luxury. For once, however, I would like to introduce a climber which does demand shelter from frost, although it may stand out of doors in its pot happily throughout the summer, and, failing a greenhouse, could be safely preserved in a warm room in winter. To do this, you would have to keep it within reasonable bounds by training it round some hoops of sticks, when it makes the most charming pot-plant imaginable. It is so pretty, it flowers so continuously, and smells so deliciously sweet, that it justifies all this extra trouble.
‘Its name is Jasminum polyanthum … As it strikes very readily from cuttings a home-grown stock may be raised within a very short time if wanted. To look at, it resembles the familiar white summer-flowering jasmine, officinale, but the flowers are larger, the scent twenty times as powerful, and the rosy, pointed buds are so pretty among the dark green leaves as to be like little jewels in themselves. I have a sprig six inches long on my table, today in January, carryi
ng twenty-two buds, so its name polyanthum, meaning many-flowered, is manifestly well deserved. On the parent plant, now standing in an unheated glass lean-to, a few flowers are already open, a real boon in January. I hope I have said enough to stir temptation.
‘In the milder counties it could, of course, be grown out of doors, and I have in fact seen a magnificent specimen reaching as high as the eaves of the house in Highdown, near Goring-on-Sea, in Sussex. Here it has the wall to protect it from the north wind, and the sea-air which always means less frost. In Devon or Cornwall, or in some sheltered parts of Somerset, Dorset, and Wales, I imagine that it would grow exuberantly and to a great height. Like all such twining things, it tends to get into a tangle, which, as all gardeners know to their cost, leads to a lot of dead wood in the centre and is plaguy to control. The best way of thwarting this airless, lightless jungle is to train some strong shoots sideways, away from the main stem; otherwise we shall find ourselves with a task like unravelling several milesworth of mad hanks of string.
‘For those whose interest I may have caught by this mention of the Chinese jasmine, I might end by a reference to the Cape jasmine, J. angulare, which is said to be even more fragrant.’
SPRING
Vita was devoted to auriculas, which reveal their beauty best close to. She had a good collection. When they were in flower, they would come inside to take pride of place, to be admired for their velvet texture and their extraordinary range of colours. She comments:
‘There is no denying that the kind known as the Show Auricula [as distinct from alpine, garden types], which demands to be grown under glass, is the more varied and exquisite in its colourings and markings and general strangeness. Above the mealy stems and leaves, looking as though they had been dusted with powdered chalk, rise the flat heads, curiously scalloped with a margin of contrary colour, it may be of white or gold or green, or of purple or a reddish bronze, all as velvet as a pansy.
Auricula ‘Argus’.
‘The show auricula is perfectly hardy but demanding protection from the rain which would make a porridgy mess of its floury-white powder. The pure whiteness of the mealy farina is an essential character of the show auricula; and if it runs all the beauty is lost.
‘The plants, however, should never be coddled; an unheated greenhouse suits them, with plenty of ventilation, and when they have finished flowering they can spend their time out of doors, their pots sunk to the rim in a bed of sand or sifted ashes, away from a hot sun …
‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the passion for auriculas equalled the earlier passion for tulips, especially and I think rather touchingly among the miners and cotton-spinners of Lancashire, growers had their theories about the best kind of ingredients to use in potting.
‘Goose guano and the soil thrown up by moles both had their advocates. Today, the John Innes compost is recommended: two parts sterilized and sifted loam, three parts peat, two parts sand, to which you may add an ounce of hoof and horn per bushel, and some crushed charcoal.’
Mary Keen, the garden designer, has a great collection of show auriculas. She recommends an easier potting-medium recipe: 4 parts loam-based John Innes no. 2; 2 parts leaf mould; and 1 part grit. The pots should be topped off with grit after planting.
Vita writes: ‘Repotting should be done in June; don’t use too large a pot and keep the pots shaded until re-rooting has taken place … Bearing in mind what I said about rain spoiling the mealy farina,’ she goes on, ‘it should be superfluous to add that watering from a can must be done carefully, from a spout not a rose. Watering will be necessary, because the plants must never be allowed to dry out while they are in their glassy palace. This presents a difficulty in prolonged frosty weather, when the soil in the pots might freeze up during the night if left damp after a drink during the day. The only solution, if you are really compelled to water a flagging misery at so unpropitious a time, is to carry it into a temporary shelter where frost cannot harden and clutch with cruel claws.
‘So greatly did the old florists esteem the Show auricula, that they used to stage it in miniature theatres, something like Punch and Judy, painting pictures in the interior of the theatre in order to give interest to their gardens when the plants were not in flower.’
Mary Keen displays her collection in an ‘auricula theatre’ of great glamour and beauty, and she has a smaller metal stand with hoops for the pots, shaped like a pyramid. This shows them off brilliantly, sitting in the middle of a table, and is a perfect system for those of us who have fewer to show.
Vita also liked the odd grand, stately indoor plant, a shrub or climber brought in from the greenhouse, which she could stand in the Priest’s House dining room or Harold’s workroom in the South Cottage. The natural place for these impressive potted plants would have been the Big Room (now called the Library), which was intended for entertaining, but after 1930 and the beginning of their new life at Sissinghurst, Vita became much less social. She wanted to see fewer people – and those, often alone – so this room was hardly used. Socialising apart, she still took pleasure in having these few exotic items around her.
Billbergia was much favoured, easy to grow and ideal for moving from the greenhouse to a prominent window or table when it was looking its best in March or April. Few people would know or recognise it – introducing others to something unusual always gave Vita a frisson of pleasure.
‘It is a most amusing pot-plant for a cool greenhouse,’ she enthuses, ‘or even for a room indoors, since it is so nearly hardy that it asks only to be kept free from frost. I have even seen it described as “a common cottage window plant”, though I must admit that I have never seen it on any cottage window sill. This should be enough to recommend it in these days when so many people go in for indoor gardening.
‘What is it like? It is difficult to describe. If I were describing it in botanical terms I should have to say its flowers were zygomorphic, stamens inserted into the base of the perianth, and what sort of a picture would that convey? No, I would rather say that it is more like a crazy jeweller’s dream than a flower, an immensely long earring in the most fantastic mixture of colours: bright pink stem and bracts, with a 4-in-long dingle-dangle of green, blue, pink, and yellow, a thing to swing from the headdress of a Balinese dancer or from the ear-lobes of a beauty in a Persian miniature. Yet even that amateurish pictorial effort cannot make you see it. Does it help if I add that it belongs to the spiky pineapple family?
‘Billbergia nutans [also called the ‘friendship plant’ and ‘queen’s tears’] is the easiest to grow. There are other varieties, some of which sound even more alluring, such as Billbergia zebrina, stripy as a zebra, but nutans is the most reliable so far as flowering goes; in fact, it has never disappointed me, flowering with the utmost liberality every March into April. If you want to increase it, you break it up after flowering into rosettes which can then be repotted, and the old ones thrown away; or else you can repot the whole plant into a larger pot with some fresh soil, rather on the light side and well drained. Kept in this way, a single plant may produce over a score of its strange, hanging flowers. The native home of the Billbergias extends from Brazil to Mexico.’
For the end of spring, Vita had another unusual recommendation, which looks more exotic and difficult to grow than it is, a plant you rarely see now apart from at Royal Horticultural Society or Alpine Garden Society shows:
‘[M]ight I recommend something which will give pleasure under glass in May? We have such a foison [an abundance] of flowers out of doors in May that perhaps we do not want to be bothered with a pot plant just then. Still, I hope you will try it. It is an orchid, called Pleione Pricei.
‘Orchids sound difficult and expensive and far beyond our reach, but this one is easy and very pleasing to those who have eyes to see. It can be grown in the open, in a pocket of the rock-garden, for it is perfectly hardy, but then it suffers injury from the weather beating down on it, spoiling the flower just as it comes towards its consummation,
so on the whole it is wiser to grow it in a pot or pan. It comes from Formosa; it likes a mixture of leaf-mould, sand, loam, and peat; and it must never be allowed to get dry.’
When I was a child I spent a lot of time botanising with my father, and part of that experience involved going to Alpine Garden Society shows. These were the moments when everyone brought plants from their alpine houses and set them out to compete on the show bench. They would select the best-looking species with the most flowers at that moment, wash their terracotta bulb trays and top them off with granite chipping to show the flowers to maximum effect. In May, ‘best in show’ was always won by the same plant belonging to the same man – a vicar from three villages away – an amazing Pleione pricei (now Pleione formosana, commonly called the Taiwan pleione), a carpet of flowers on one huge plant, its fringed trumpet – as if cut with crimping shears – and its bright pink wings. Whenever he turned up, all the rest of us would inwardly groan, ‘Oh no, not him again.’ We all longed for the vicar to be ill on the day so that someone else stood a chance. We loved to hate his orchid, but I can picture it now nearly forty years later. It was quite a thing.
SUMMER
For summer, potted plants for the greenhouse are less necessary, and perhaps too much hassle with so much going on in the garden, but Vita recommends one or two. She loved salpiglossis, whose velvet flowers can look like Venetian paper at its best – particularly the purple marked with gold, and the brown, ‘Royale Chocolate’. This is most beautiful when there are some flowers in bud and some fully open. Then you get a mint-chocolate colour duo – from the buds, a greeny-white, to the full-out flowers, a rich dark chocolate.
Salpiglossis is a plant that struggles in a wet summer, the petals splotching readily in the rain, and its delicate stems do not cope well in the wind, but it’s so velvety and exotic it’s worth a go. It will flower happily in a conservatory or cold greenhouse, or even – as Vita tells us – grown as a pot plant for a sunny window ledge in summer, or even winter:
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