‘Cut your flowers, he says, during dull, sunless hours,’ Vita continues. A particularly good time is when all the plant cells are in a positive water balance at the beginning or end of the day. ‘My correspondent,’ she goes on, ‘condemns as an old wives’ tale the placing of aspirin tablets or copper coins in the water.’ In fact, a soluble aspirin (which contains salicylic acid) changes the pH, acidifying the flower water and so cutting down bacterial buildup. Bacteria are what create the slime at the end of the stem, and with that block water uptake. In my experience aspirin helps prolong vase life, and vinegar works just as well. Or you may find a drop of bleach easier.
Vita’s correspondent ‘gives a slight approval to lumps of charcoal, in so far as they absorb air from the water. I suppose that we all have our theories, but this idea of air entering the stems is worth consideration. I pass it on to you.’
12
THE RECENT PAST
Vita and Harold outside South Cottage in the late 1950s.
Having created their garden together, Harold and Vita spent as much time as they could planting, pruning, weeding and watering. Harold was in London during the week, but Vita rarely spent time away from her garden. Throughout the last thirty years of her life she went on the occasional cruise and the odd French or Italian holiday, but she did not travel or socialise much, preferring to concentrate on a few close friends, her writing and Sissinghurst. Vita wrote in 1957: ‘May I assure the gentleman who writes to me (quite often) from a Priory in Sussex that I am not the armchair, library-fireside gardener he evidently suspects, “never having performed any single act of gardening” myself, and that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger-nails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation?’
Vita’s enthusiasm for gardening remained undiminished, as did Harold’s, particularly in the Lime Walk. But they gradually took on more help, moving from two gardeners plus one part-time handyman-chauffeur at the start in 1930, to five including Jack Vass as head gardener through the 1940s (with a break for wartime service in the RAF) and most of the 50s.
Vita and Harold decided in 1938 to open the garden under the National Gardens Scheme, for just two days a year. A couple of years later they increased this to daily opening (in the main growing season) and charged a shilling entrance fee, with an honesty bowl left under the arch.
Vita liked the garden being open. Visitors – ‘the Shillingses’, as she called them – often, particularly towards the end of the day, reported seeing her weeding or planting, when she would be happy to have a chat and answer questions on plant names and show them her favourites, flowering at that moment. She wrote in the New Statesman in 1939 that she liked having the garden visitors around because they were old-fashioned, well behaved types who ‘had a particular form of courtesy … a gardener’s courtesy, in a world where courtesy is giving place to rougher things’. Harold didn’t always agree, and visitors reported him as being sometimes rather gruff.
The entrance to Sissinghurst, with the stall from which plants were sold.
Jack Vass and Vita fell out in 1957, and she took on Ronald Platt as head gardener, who stayed only two years. So in 1959 she was again looking for someone new. With increased opening and with garden visitor numbers already at six thousand (huge numbers for a private amateur garden. By comparison, fewer than half come to Perch Hill on open days), she needed more staff. It was then that she employed Pam Schwerdt and Sybille Kreutzberger, who had written to her looking for a place to run a nursery. They would be Sissinghurst’s head gardeners for over three decades. With their arrival, the next era of the place and its garden was about to begin.
As Tony Lord’s book Gardening at Sissinghurst tells us in some detail, when Pam and Sybille arrived, Harold’s and Vita’s ages and their health meant that the garden was not at its best. The two new women had trained at the rigorous Waterperry School of Horticulture in Oxfordshire and had stayed there ten years. They could not have been more highly trained, and as soon as they were taken on they set out to reinvigorate the Sissinghurt garden. As Sybille said to me recently, from day one it was easy to see how they could improve things.
Head gardeners, Pam and Sybille. They arrived in 1959 and stayed at Sissinghurst for over thirty years.
They left the four other gardeners already there to get on with their own work, while the two of them got stuck into the areas they felt were crying out for care and attention. For a start, the hedges had become too tall and too thick, so they cut them hard back. They tackled the ever-encroaching perennial weeds; they conditioned the soil; and they then started on the planting. Vita was growing a lot of short-season plants – peonies, Ligtu Hybrid alstroemerias and bearded iris, the varieties available in the 1930s, but the range of plants had grown hugely in the thirty or so years since. For Vita and Harold and their private garden, it was fine for each room to have its weeks of glory and then for the next to set out its stall, but this sort of garden and this sort of gardening did not work for somewhere open to the public from mid-spring to autumn.
Pam and Sybille, with their up-to-date plant knowledge, knew these varieties could be replaced by newer, longer-flowering forms, as well as supplemented by other plants that would perform for not just weeks but many months. They both felt that each garden room could easily be flowerier for longer, whatever the season, and they achieved this by gradually introducing a wide range of half-hardy perennials. These included new varieties of salvias, verbenas, arctotis and argyranthemums, as well as dahlias, aiming to make sure that nowhere had a blank moment during the main growing season. As Sybille says, ‘I cannot believe that if VSW had been exposed to these things, she would not have chosen them too.’
They added Arctotis ‘Mahogany’ and ‘Flame’ to replace the wallflowers on the south side of the South Cottage, still planted out there today where they flower from June until November; they put in Verbena merci, a beautiful, rich compact burgundy verbena, as well as the purple Verbena rigida, which both flower for four or five months in the Rose Garden; then the brilliant pink Verbena ‘Sissinghurst’, still filling the four bronze urns in the entrance courtyard throughout the summer and autumn; as well as argyranthemums in the White Garden and Salvia guaranitica in the Purple Border, and many more.
They also refined Vita’s system of generous planting, putting in large groups of things, with seven or nine of one variety in a drift, but – a deft touch – continuing those same plants across the path in a smaller group. As Lex, until recently the head gardener, has commented, the Sissinghurst way of planting things is very distinct. Gardeners usually aim to plant, not in a line, but with everything equally spaced – but not at Sissinghurst. The style is ‘fake amateurishness’, with things strewn in an apparently random way, ‘twiddling the group through other plants in a typically informal Sissinghurst way’.
Pam and Sybille also added even more climbers, particularly clematis such as ‘Perle d’Azur’, flanked by ceanothus to extend its colour season, on the Powys curved wall in the Rose Garden; plus on the north wall behind the Purple Border some summer and early-autumn-flowering clematis in the red and purple range.
Gradually the garden got tidier, more cohesive, but it remained full, and almost all of it luscious with colour from early in the year till late. Harold’s brilliant structure and Vita’s inspired choice of place, plants and style made Sissinghurst a garden unparalleled in its beauty. Added to all this were the practical skills, the plant knowledge and the creative eye of Pam and Sybille, combining to make a garden that seemed to reach its peak of perfection in the mid-1960s.
You can see this so clearly in the photographs by Edwin Smith taken the year Vita died, and this high point continued for many years after that. Vita knew that she had created something of lasting value, and that there was every chance it might remain so in the hands of the dynamic duo she called ‘the girls’. Harold survived her by six years, sad and lonely. Visitors would see him sitting on the Tower Lawn wi
th tears running down his cheeks. Their son Nigel was ‘awed by his desolation’, but when Harold died in 1968 he too collapsed to a depth he had never known.
Vita in the garden at Sissinghurst in 1956 in her distinctive, impressively stylish gardening garb of silk shirt, cotton breeches and tight leather lace-up boots.
Pam and Sybille pre-dated the National Trust, which took over Sissinghurst in 1967. Vita was a founder member of the National Trust Gardens Committee from 1948, but did not want them involved with her own garden. Nigel, rather than the older Ben, was to inherit Sissinghurst and the garden on Vita’s death. Ben, a renowned art historian based in London, preferred urban life. Famously, when Vita was asked by Nigel in 1954 what he should do about the future of Sissinghurst after her death, and whether she would be happy for him to transfer ownership to the Trust, this was the response she gave in her diary: ‘I said Never, never, never. Au grand jamais, jamais. Never, never, never! Not that hard little metal plate at my door! Nigel can do what he likes when I’m dead, but so long as I live, no Nat Trust or any other foreign body shall have my darling. No, no. Over my corpse or my ashes, not otherwise … It’s bad enough to have lost my Knole, but they shan’t take S/hurst from me.’
By the end of her life her view had softened, and she left Nigel a letter saying she realised it would be difficult for him to keep Sissinghurst and she would understand if he wanted to choose the National Trust option.
With large death duties and little capital, Nigel faced the choice either to let the garden gradually go downhill, sell it, or the farm around it, or persuade the National Trust to take it. He and Harold both felt this was the best course to take, ensuring the garden and the buildings at Sissinghurst would be preserved. The National Trust, after much negotiating, took Sissinghurst over in April 1967, with Nigel’s family having the right to live in the south range and South Cottage in perpetuity. The visitor numbers were already at twenty-eight thousand in 1966, but within a year they had almost doubled.
Once they had moved down from London in 1963, Nigel and his wife Philippa became more involved with the garden. Philippa got the famous American garden designer Lanning Roper to come and give advice, but it was Pam and Sybille who were very much at the helm. Their horticultural expertise showed, and the garden became even more popular. The two of them, along with the other gardeners and the books that Nigel wrote about both the garden and his parents, helped to make Sissinghurst famous, and one of the most visited places in Britain.
Adam, Juliet and Harold a few days after Vita died in 1962.
Pam and Sybille stayed at Sissinghurst until 1991, when they retired to make their own garden in Gloucestershire, and Sarah Cook then took over. Sarah had been trained by ‘the girls’ at Sissinghurst for four years, from 1984 to 1988, and returned for a few months’ handover early in the New Year of 1991. She added her own touches, but she was much influenced by the ‘Pam and Sybille way’. That year the visitor numbers hit the all-time high of 197,000 and the famed timed tickets were started. This entry system was introduced to try to stop the increasing wear and tear on the garden; the aim was never to let numbers exceed two thousand people at one time.
Adam and our dog, Frizzy.
After Sarah came Alexis Datta. She was trained by Sarah and had been her deputy at Sissinghurst for many years. Lex left in 2013 and was replaced by Troy Scott Smith in July that year. Troy, who had worked at Sissinghurst in the 1990s, was previously head gardener for seven years at Bodnant Garden near Colwyn Bay.
This succession of gardeners, along with the National Trust, have done great things at Sissinghurst. The Trust restored the fragile brickwork of the Tower so subtly that within a day of the scaffolding coming down, you would not have known anything or anyone had been there. The clock, too, has just been restored; every wall, every path, has been mended many times; a lot of grass and concrete paths have been replaced by much nicer York stone; every plant has been cared for or, when it has had its day, replaced; and every piece of furniture restored in a sensitive, curatorial way in a style fitting with Sissinghurst’s apparent ‘shabbiness’, and then carefully maintained. Even now, as I write in 2013, every book in the library – a valuable twentieth-century collection – is being worked on to make sure they’re here for at least another hundred years.
Harold’s remarkable structure is almost totally intact and the horticultural excellence is still very apparent. Undoubtedly, Vita’s essence is still there, but the spirit of the garden has changed.
Much is not changed at all: the White Garden, the Purple Border and the Cottage Garden are as good, if not better, now than they were in Vita’s day. The people who have gardened here since Vita have taken her idea and strengthened, extended and improved it in all of those three garden rooms. There is still the Ming vase in the centre of the White Garden, placed there by Vita and Harold in 1937. There’s still the weeping willow-leaved pear enveloping the statue of the Virgin by Toma Rosandić, put there in the winter of 1949/50 and still surrounded by many of Vita’s favourite white and silver plants – Stachys lanata, Romneya coulteri, white violas, bearded iris and poppies – just as she described it in her Observer column of 22 January 1950.
The Irish yews in the early 1960s, relaxed and shaggy, not meticulously shaped and pruned, with rosemary ‘Sissinghurst’ creeping out over the path.
She planted almonds running down the middle of the White Garden to create an architectural backbone, and planted the climbing Rosa mulliganii to swathe them in a fragrant curtain for a few weeks of summer; but the curtain got the better of the nut trees and they collapsed under the weight of the rose. In 1970 they were replaced by a metal rose arbour – designed by Nigel, inspired by the paperclips on his desk – and even though this particular rose has a very short season, it’s movingly beautiful there at the heart of the garden and especially at its height of floweriness around 1 July. I’m sure Vita would love it, growing on its intricate but sturdy metal frame.
There is still Vita’s favourite Rosa moyesii in the Purple Border, with the statuesque and towering cardoons rocketing up to ten or twelve feet, and favoured plants such as Chinese bell-flower (Platycodon grandiflorum) – ‘[a]n effective splash of truly imperial purple’ – as well as Iris chrysographes and Iris sibirica which Vita loved in all its colour forms. Pam and Sybille added their wide range of clematis and magnificent new plants such as Lupinus ‘Blue Jacket’ and Delphinium ‘Black Knight’, and lots of mildew-resistant asters which have come to characterise this border, helping to start its purple and blue show earlier and carrying on its colour later in the year.
The Cottage Garden too is still brimming with sunset colours. There are Vita-style crinolines of shrub roses, and orange-flowered potentillas pierced by firework kniphofias, which Harold hated but Vita loved, as well as red and yellow rock roses framing the edge of the path. Even more wallflowers (Erysimum ‘Blood Red’ and ‘Fireking’) have been added since Vita’s day, to fill the enclosed garden with perfume, and there are still pots of ‘Lady Tulip’ and Vita and Harold’s favourite Tulipa ‘Couleur Cardinal’, arranged in a clutch around Harold’s chair by the front door.
The Cottage Garden in 1962, just after Vita’s death, photographed by Edwin Smith. You almost have to tiptoe to make your way through, with plants colonising the garden from every direction, displaying Vita’s ‘cram, cram’ style.
There are strands of continuity and things that Vita would instantly recognise if she returned to walk through her garden, but I wonder if there should be more. For example, only a third of the plants in the garden now are ones there in Vita’s day. You can read about this in the Sissinghurst plant catalogue compiled by the National Trust in 1984 and annotated later by Pam and Sibylle, showing that some of the shrubs and wall plants are the ones Vita planted, or replacements, but almost all the rest have changed since 1959. As Pam said when interviewed by Tony Lord, ‘Had Lady Nicolson been alive, she would always have been adding plants. We were so thankful that somewhere along the l
ine somebody decided that Sissinghurst was going to be a place where we would go on adding rather than someone absolutely stopping the clock.’
That has to be right – it would be dull if the Sissinghurst garden was made into a mausoleum, slavishly recreating year on year the same plant combinations, good or bad, that were there in Vita’s day. And there are some things Vita definitely got wrong – ideas that were almost impossible to achieve. Her love of decorating a struggling tree, for instance, often turned out to be a bad idea: adding the climber, unless it was quite a contained grower, often killed the tree even more quickly. Pam and Sybille reduced this practice gradually through the 1960s and 70s, and it has almost totally ceased. There is the rose ‘Flora’ in a prunus by the door to Priest’s House, not planted by Vita but inspired by her, and the odd rose in the orchard, but now these are mainly trained over wooden frames.
Of course, the people who take care of the garden should, and do, make their own choices of what to add and, to an extent, what to take away. But I sometimes long to see more of her favourites. So many of the plants that Vita loved and wrote about are as good today as they were when she grew them and there should be a return to more.
Hoherias are lovely and there is still one in the garden now, but what about more crab apples, robinias, tamarisks, kolkwitzias, indigoferas and so many more of her beloved flowering shrubs? Vita’s overall philosophy of ‘Cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny’ has all but disappeared. Inevitably with so many people, so many pairs of feet in a public, no longer private, garden, plants can’t creep out over the paths without being trampled; and there are bound to be complaints about tresses of roses that swathe the paths catching visitors’ hair – or worse, an eye – but the flower beds and walls can be filled to overbrimming
Sissinghurst Page 27
