11

CUT FLOWERS

Small pots of simple flowers were always to be found on Vita’s desk.

Vita always had a few simple vases of flowers on the desk and table in her writing room in the Tower, as well as scattered around the rooms they used at Sissinghurst. It was important to her to have at least a sprig to pick every week of the year. As she says in In Your Garden, ‘A flowerless room is a soul-less room, to my thinking; but even one solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.’

Typical of women of her class and time, she had Mrs Staples to look after her in the kitchen, so she never had to cook, as well as employing increasing numbers of gardeners; but flowers she always picked for herself. She was not one for the great Dutch still-life style, those complicated mixed arrangements, preferring casually chosen stems of one thing or another, or perhaps a big vase of blossom such as philadelphus, or a bunch of zinnias or dahlias to put on the central table in her writing room, or on the lapis lazuli table in the Big Room on the rare event they used it.

She often sent Harold back to London with flowers for his flat. Once he reported in a letter to her during the war, ‘the stylosas [Iris unguicularis] have unfurled themselves quite beautifully back in London. It is as if all the Ladies at Longchamps had suddenly unfurled pale blue sunshades.’ Even when Harold was posted to Berlin in 1929, Vita sent flowers from the garden at Long Barn – daphne, iris, hyacinths and tulips – in the diplomatic bag.

WINTER

Winter flowers were particularly precious – the harbingers of greater abundance just around the corner. Vita loved to have plenty of things to pick for that time of the year – once the garden is chock-a-block, cut flowers are not so crucial. By late spring, you only need take a walk in the garden and you will feel replenished, but in winter, cut flowers inside are key.

‘Flowers come so thick in summer that one hesitates which to pick among so many, one is apt to forget the bare cold days when the earth is a miser offering only one or two, take it or leave it. Wrapped in mufflers and overcoats we go and peer about for a stray sprig of winter-sweet, a splashed and muddy hellebore, a premature violet – anything, anything to fill one solitary glass with some pretence of spring long before spring has really arrived. There are the bulbs, of course, which one has carefully plunged in ashes or placed in a dark cupboard, according to the instructions in the garden books and catalogues: but somehow there is always something a little artificial about any flower which has been compelled to bloom before its time. Even though we may not number ourselves among the rich who languidly fill their rooms on an order to the florist with lilac at Christmas and tulips on New Year’s Day, there is still, I think, a great difference between the flowers which we force and those which we have the patience to wait for at their proper season. For one thing, the forced flower always slightly spoils our delight in its outdoor successor when it normally arrives; and for another, the forced flower itself, however welcome, is always something of a fake. To the true lover of flowers, these arguments are disturbingly potent.

‘The moral of all this is, that we especially welcome any flower which lightens the gloom of winter of its own accord. The more fragile and improbable-looking, the better.’

I was brought up with Iris unguicularis on my parents’ doorstep. They had a large clump they could pick from whenever they wanted, right through the winter until the middle of spring. I loved the purple cigars, chalky mauve on the outside, with a glimpse of rich plush purple within. My mother usually had a small glass vase of four or five stems by her telephone.

Iris unguicularis ‘Walter Butts’.

‘The Algerian iris are most obliging plants,’ Vita tells us, ‘even if maltreated, but a little extra kindliness and understanding will bring forth an even better response. As is true of most of us, whether plants or humans.

‘Kindliness, so far as the Algerian iris is concerned, consists in starving it. Rich cultivation makes it run to leaf rather than to flower. What it really enjoys is being grown in a miserably poor soil, mostly composed of old lime and mortar rubble and even gravel: a gritty mixture at the foot of a sunny wall, the grittier and the sunnier the better. Sun and poverty are the two things it likes. To give it the maximum of sun to ripen itself off during the summer, you should chop down its leaves in May or early June and let the sun get at it for so long as our climate allows. There is no more that you can do for it except to guard it against snails and slugs. It is vital to do this if the flower is not to be nibbled and tattered by these creatures, which hibernate so happily within the leaves and in the cracks of the wall. Any proprietary slug-bait will do the job for you … It may be unkind to the snails, but one has to make one’s choice.

‘If you have not yet got this iris in your garden and want to acquire it, you can plant it in March or April; but September is the best time for transplanting. It does not much like being split up and moved, so, whenever you acquire it, do make sure that it does not get too dry until it has had time to establish itself. After that, it will give you no trouble.’

You can pick the odd aconite and float it in a shallow bowl, but snowdrops are even better for January and February vases. Arrange a few stems mixed with a sprig of ivy, or show off a bit and use a mini-noughts-and-crosses grid. Make this from straight stems of hazel or brightly coloured dogwood, cut just long enough to rest on the top of a small bowl, and tie them at every cross-over with a reef knot, all the knots arranged in the same direction so the grid can fold away. Then slide the mini-posies in, one to each square. The grid holds the flowers up out of the water, while still giving them plenty to drink, and transforms the delicate stems into something with impact. Slot the odd sprig of ivy in between.

‘We all love snowdrops, with a sentimental love going back to our childhood,’ Vita comments. ‘They bravely appeared through the snow, justifying their French name of Perce-neige, but perhaps we never knew very much about them beyond the fact that we could pick a bunch in January when there was very little else to pick.

‘There are many varieties, and it may come as a surprise to learn that at least three are autumn-flowering, even so early as September. Personally I prefer my snowdrops at the accustomed time, in the depth of winter.

‘Cultivation is easy, though it must be remembered that the commonest form, nivalis, will do better in some localities than in others, notably in Scotland and the northern counties. I suppose everybody knows that the time to dig up and replant the bulbs, dividing the clumps if necessary, is when the flowers are just beginning to fade. Move them quickly, and do not let them come into contact with any animal manure: they hate it.’

For a shady spot, we’d be mad not to grow hellebores, both for the garden and – in the case of H. niger – picking for inside:

‘There are several kinds of Hellebore, but the two varieties usually seen in English gardens are more familiar under their prettier names of Christmas rose and Lenten rose, Helleborus niger and Helleborus orientalis respectively. They are true to their association with the calendar, which means that from December to April the clumps of one or the other are in flower.

‘Why the Christmas rose, which is white, should be called black in Latin I could not imagine until I discovered that the adjective referred to the root; but I still cannot imagine why people do not grow both these varieties more freely. They will fill up many an odd corner; their demands are few; and they will give flowers at a time of year when flowers are scarce. They like a rather shady place; moist, but well drained. A western aspect suits them. The one thing they will not stand is a poor sandy soil which gets dried out in the summer. Once planted, leave them alone. They will grow in strength from year to year especially if you give them an occasional mulch of compost, leaf-mould, or rotted manure. I have a plant in my garden which to my certain knowledge has been there for fifty years. It was bequeathed to me by an old countrywoman of the old type, who wanted me to have the enjoyment of it after she had gone.

‘It is, of course, cheaper to grow them from seed than to buy plants, and the seed germinates very readily if it is freshly harvested, say from the garden of a friend, in May or June.’

Both H. niger and the Corsican hellebore (now called H. argutifolius), with its large, leathery, dark green leaves, make good cut flowers, the Corsican lasting up to a month in water if you’ve seared its stem ends, which I find makes them last longer than the splitting Vita advises.

‘The Christmas rose is ideal for picking, lasting for weeks indoors if you split the stems. Cover the clump with a hand-light [a glass cloche] to avoid splashing with mud from heavy rain. I have been told that the way to get long stems is to heap sand over the centre of the plant, when the flower-stalks, under the obligation of reaching for the light, will force their way upwards.

‘Those who share my taste for greenish flowers may like to grow the Corsican hellebore (H. corsicus), a tough and handsome plant whose tightly packed head of strangely livid blossoms will last either out of doors or in a bowl of water from early March to May. Before the flower buds open they look not unlike a bunch of Muscat grapes, but presently they open out flat, when they look like a miniature pale green water-lily, if you can imagine a water-lily about the size of a penny.’

Lenten Rose – Helleborus orientalis.

The Lenten hellebore (or Lenten rose), Helleborus orientalis – and the modern Garden Hybrids bred from them – are more temperamental as cut flowers, often not lasting on a long stem even if you sear the ends (see here). These are best cut short, the flowers held out of the water on a grid – using the same system as for snowdrops (see here). Or wait until one flower on each stem is just starting to form a seedpod. They usually have enough lignin (the substance which many plants possess that gives them their woodiness) in the cell walls by that stage to remain upstanding.

SPRING

Vita relished what she called a tussie-mussie, a small mixed bunch of winter and early spring bulbs for arranging in a sherry glass to sit on her desk as she wrote. These were her favourite mini-flower arrangements, best before the garden had properly got going. That’s when you can really appreciate the delicate small-scale perfection of these tiny mixes of flowers and leaves. It’s in late February when they really come into their own – you can have one or two sitting near you by your bed or on your desk every week for a month or two.

When I was young my father had to have an operation for a duodenal ulcer. He was in bed for weeks in early spring and every Saturday I’d pick him a little posy which would just about keep going until the following weekend. As a result I’ve always loved them, two or three flowers of seven or eight different things – coloured polyanthus, Cyclamen coum, scillas, snowdrops, miniature highly scented Narcissus canaliculatus, the more delicate species crocus and a grape hyacinth or two – adding up to a bunch no bigger than the palm of my hand. That’s what Vita would call a tussie-mussie.

‘A dear near neighbour brought me a tussie-mussie this week,’ she writes in February 1950. ‘The dictionary defines tuzzymuzzy, or tussie-mussie, as a bunch or posy of flowers, a nosegay … It is composed of at least five different flowers, all perfectly chosen. She goes always for the best, which I am sure is the secret of good gardening: choose always the best of any variety you want to grow. Thus, in the bunch she brought me, the violets were pink violets, the sort called Coeur d’Alsace, and the one Iris Reticulata she put in was the sort called Hercules, which is redder than the familiar purple and gold. The grape-hyacinths were the small sky-blue azureus, which flowers earlier and is prettier than the dark blue later sort. The crocus in her bunch was not the common yellow, but had brown markings on its outside; I think it may be C. susianus or it may be Moonlight, but I forgot to ask her. The anemone that she put in must be a freakishly early bloom of Anemone St. Bavo, amethyst petals with an electric-blue centre. How wise she is to grow Anemone St. Bavo instead of the coarser Anemone St. Brigid.’

One of Vita’s favoured spring cut flowers was the widow iris, Hermodactylus tuberosa. She loved iris, particularly this one with its delicious sweet scent and extraordinary green and black velvet flowers. I have grown these very successfully in a well-drained spot with soil on top of builders’ rubble – it’s the iris referred to earlier that my parents had a good clump of in one of their Vita-inspired sinks. The key thing is not to move them, as they’ll get better and better, the clumps eventually huge and covered with flowers for several weeks at a stretch. They don’t last long in water but their exotic colour, texture and scent make them hugely worthwhile. Arrange them simply on their own or with the beautiful white, green-outlined bells of the spring snowflake (Leucojum) which flowers at the same time.

‘Several correspondents have asked me to say something about that strangely coloured black and green flower commonly called Iris tuberosa, or the Snakeshead iris, which is to be found in florists’ shops during March and April, sold in bunches, rather cheap,’ Vita wrote, in one of her Observer articles that would later be published in In your Garden. ‘I like being asked these questions, because they come as a challenge to my own many failures in gardening and make me examine my conscience to see where I have gone wrong. I have certainly gone wrong over my Iris tuberosa. I planted it in rather too shady a place, under an apple tree, in a rich old soil, and I now see that it ought to be given the maximum of sun, in a gritty, well-drained soil, exposed to as much baking as our English summer will afford.

‘It should not be difficult to grow. The tuber is not expensive and it should increase itself if you put it in the right sort of place, dry, hot, and sunny. An Italian by origin, it grows wild in other parts of southern Europe, all indicating that it would enjoy conditions as near as we can get to the Mediterranean coast.

‘A wise precaution: mark its position in the garden by a stick or a ring of stones, because it disappears altogether during the summer, and thus is liable to get dug up by mistake.’

Gardeners and plantsmen and women can be terrible snobs – asserting that this zinnia or that dahlia is vulgar and should never be planted in your garden, however long it flowers and however easy it is to grow. One of the good things about Vita was that was not the case. She was confident enough in her own eye that she could rise above this kind of thing and make her own decisions, even if it pushed her outside conventional good taste: the familiar anemones were ‘a trifle coarse, perhaps … but how useful and flaunting!’ she enthused. ‘One should not be too much of a snob about one’s flowers. One should always preserve the nice balance between the elect and the ordinary. There is room in even the smallest garden for something to suit all tastes. I would never despise any flower just because you see it everywhere, provided it has its own beauty in its own right and is grown in the place that suits it. The common foxglove can give as much pleasure as the rarest lily – no, perhaps that isn’t quite true, but I hope you see what I mean.’

Vita habitually put flowers on Harold’s desk in South Cottage.

For planting in March but picking from late spring onwards, these Anemone coronarias take ten to twelve weeks from planting to flower. Vita loved the luscious-coloured and textured so-called poppy anemones, with their velvety, open saucer flowers. You can buy these with the colours mixed – purple-blue, pink, red and white – but that tends to give you quite a few where the saturated purity of colour is mixed with a little white and becomes wishy-washy. Better are the single-coloured cultivars, the current ones being ‘Mr Fokker’ for the deep purple-blue, ‘Cristina’ for purple-crimson, ‘The Bride’ for white, ‘Hollandia’ for a luscious scarlet; and one of my favourites, ‘Sylphide’, for a brilliant pink, no white in its tone at all.

These should be planted in March and April, Vita tells us, ‘at intervals for succession; in fact, the more you stagger the planting of anemone corms the longer succession you will get. Cheap to buy … I would advise you to get them from a reputable nurseryman rather than from a chain-store where the corms may have been hanging about for weeks, getting dried up and losing their vitality. They need no description; we all know those tight little eightpenny bunches which start arriving from Cornwall on to the street-barrows in January, and open in the most surprising way once they are released from the constriction of their elastic band and are put into water and last so long that we begin to think them immortal. They are the sorts known as Anemone St. Brigid and Anemone de Caen. There are more beautiful kinds of anemone, but these are the familiar ones.’

Extending out from the coronarias, Vita wrote about the whole anemone group. She gives valuable advice as to how to make them grow well in your garden:

‘In the seventeenth century anemones were called by the charming name of Parsley Roses, because of their fringed and curly leaves.

‘Many people complain that they cannot get anemones to do well. I think this may be due to two or three causes. Planting the corms too deep is a very common reason for failure. One and a half to two inches is quite deep enough. Another mistake frequently made is to buy the large-size corms in preference to the smaller, in the very natural belief that top-sizes, known as Jumbos in the trade, will give finer flowers. The reverse is true. Avoid Jumbo.

‘It should also be remembered that most anemones like an alkaline soil, which should be good news for the lime dwellers. An exception, of course, is the woodland nemerosa and its varieties robinsoniana and alleni; but you have only to think of our other native, Anemone pulsatilla, to realize that it occurs in its natural state on the chalky Downs. I am not saying that anemones will thrive only in soil where lime is present; in my own garden, for instance, where the soil, thank God, is neutral, many of them sow themselves all over the place, even in the grass of an orchard; but I do suggest that if your anemones disappoint you might well consider giving them a top dressing of lime.

‘Another thing that amateur growers do not always realize is that anemones of the St. Brigid and de Caen strain will not persist for ever. One has to renew after two or three years, but as non-Jumbo corms cost [very little per thousand], they should be well within the purse of anybody who would like to share the thousand out among friends.

‘Anemone fulgens, on the other hand, the brilliant red wind-flower of Mediterranean coasts, may be left for years in the same place and indeed dislikes being dug up. I think the same would apply to its descendant, the St. Bavo anemone, which sows itself in cracks of pavement and comes up year after year in ever more varying colours. I often wonder why people don’t grow the St. Bavo. They don’t seem to know about it, and are surprised when they see it, with its subtle colour of petals with an electric-blue blotch at the base.’

Although Vita didn’t do lots of forcing of leaves and flowers for inside, usually preferring them when they came naturally, she did pick and force the odd bucket of flowering currant for a large vase to cheer up the early spring:

‘The old flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum, is a familiar sight in cottage gardens, where it may sometimes be seen clipped into shape as a hedge, and a very dense, pretty hedge it makes, clothed at this time of year with a mass of pink flowers. A most reliable shrub, never taking a year off, and demanding the minimum of care or cultivation, it cannot lay claim to great distinction, and indeed some people despise the somewhat dingy pink of the individual flower; these people, with whom I find myself in agreement, should not be satisfied with the original type, introduced from the west of the United States in 1826, but should obtain its varieties splendens and King Edward VII, both far brighter in colour and just as accommodating in temperament.

‘I suppose that most people know the tip of cutting generous sheaves of the common flowering currant in January and putting them in a pail of water indoors [in a dark cupboard. When they are brought] out into the light in March, they will find not a pink but a snow-white sheaf, a bride’s sheaf, to reward them.’

SUMMER

For late spring and early summer, Vita – like most of us – loved peonies, her ‘gross Edwardian swagger ladies’. Along with delphiniums, peonies were one of the few herbaceous perennials she mixed in her borders and from which she picked the odd vase. Unlike delphiniums, though, peonies did well at Sissinghurst, not succumbing so readily to the scourge of the slug. Sybille Kreutzberger told me that Vita used to joke about the failure with delphiniums – ‘Hayter [one of the two gardeners who started working at Sissinghurst in 1930] treads on them,’ she would whisper. But their scanty growth was almost certainly due to the lack of slug control.

Paeonia mlokosiewiczi, called by many ‘Molly-the-witch’ (as its proper name is so unpronounceable), is a magnificent pale primrose-yellow single, and many people’s favourite. Vita mentions a couple of others – ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ and ‘Duchesse de Nemours’, which remain hugely popular and rightly so. Each individual flower lasts at least a week in water, and even the green bullet buds will unfurl into fully blown flowers, one stem giving you up to three weeks of bloom at a stretch. These two varieties in particular give off a good scent, the white ‘Duchesse’ a delicious mix of roses crossed with lily-of-the-valley. I would add Monsieur Jules Elie as another highly scented top performer.

Peony lactiflora hybrid.

‘There are few more repaying plants,’ Vita asserts. ‘Rabbits dislike them; their flowering season extends through May and June; they last for a week or more as picked flowers for the house … Larger than any rose, [each flower] has something of the cabbage rose’s voluminous quality; and when it finally drops from the vase, it sheds its vast petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap, much as a rose will suddenly fall, making us look up from our book or conversation, to notice for one moment the death of what had still appeared to be a living beauty …

‘[T]hey will flourish in sun or semi-shade; they will tolerate almost any kind of soil, lime-free or otherwise; they will even put up with clay … Slugs don’t care for [them]…; and the only disease [they] may seriously suffer from is wilt, a fungus, Botrytis. If this appears, you must cut out the diseased bits and burn them; but in the many years I have grown peonies in my garden I have, touch wood, never found any trace of disease amongst my gross Edwardian swagger ladies … They never need dividing or transplanting; in fact, they hate it; and they are so long-lived that once you have established a clump (which is not difficult) they will probably outlive you. Add to all this, that they will endure neglect. Mine struggled through the weeds of war and seem none the worse for it … They will go ahead, and probably outlive the person who planted them, so that his or her grandchild will be picking finer flowers fifty years hence …

‘Of course, if you want to do them well, they will respond as any plant will respond to good treatment. If you have a little bonemeal to spare, fork it in during the autumn. But it is not really necessary. The only thing which is really necessary is careful planting in the first instance, and by this I mean that you should dig the hole eighteen inches deep; put in some rotted manure or compost at the bottom; fill it in with ordinary soil and plant shallow, i.e. don’t bury the crown more than a couple of inches underground. This is important.

A vase of lilies on Vita’s desk at Long Barn with a humea, the incense plant, in a pot to the left.

‘There are, roughly speaking, two different kinds of peony: the herbaceous, in which we may include the species, and the Tree peony (Paeonia suffruticosa, or Moutan). The Tree peony is not very easy to get nowadays [and is expensive]. Still, it is worth the investment, especially as it will start to flower young and will flower more and more copiously as it advances in age. Never cut it down. Mine were destroyed for ever by a jobbing gardener … when he cut them to the ground one autumn.

‘The herbaceous peony is the one we are accustomed to see in some not very attractive shades of red or pink in cottage gardens. Do not condemn it on that account. There are now many varieties, either single or double, ranging from pure white through white-and-yellow to shell-pink, deep pink, and the sunset colour you find in P. peregrina. This really flames; and its companion, P. lobata Sunbeam, is as good, if not better. As a yellow I would recommend P. Mlokosiewiczi, did it not cost 30s. a plant; I grew it from a sixpenny packet of seed myself, but you have to be very patient to do that. Apart from this, P. Laura Dessert is probably the best yellow and at a more reasonable price of 7s. 6d. Sarah Bernhardt, at 6s., has enormous pale pink flowers, double; Kelway’s Glorious, at 12s. 6d. is a fine white; Duchesse de Nemours, at 5s., is white with a slightly yellowish tinge and smaller flowers; Martin Cahuzac at 6s., a dark red, has leaves which colour well in autumn.’

In contrast to the showiness of a peony, Vita also appreciated the delicacy of ixias to pick for a vase on her desk in June. You rarely see these now, but more of us should grow them – elegant and long-lasting once cut. Like freesias but without the scent, these are finer-looking, the flowers held on thread-like stems.

‘Brave gardeners who have a sunny corner to spare, at the foot of a south wall for choice, and a poor sandy soil, should plant some bulbs of Ixia, the South African Corn-lily, in just such a place as you would set Iris stylosa [unguiculari], starved and baked to flower at its best … Ixias are not entirely hardy, though hardier than the freesias which they somewhat resemble. Deep planting of about six inches, and a little cover throughout our damp winter, should, however, ensure their survival. On the whole I have found the ixias reasonably reliable, even in an ordinary flat bed. It is true that they diminish instead of increasing with the years, but they are so cheap, even for named varieties, that a dozen or so can be added each year to replenish the stock …

‘… graceful … about eighteen inches high, [they have] rushlike leaves and a flower-spike in various colours: white, yellow, coral-pink, and sometimes striped like the boiled sweets of our childhood. These, in a mixture, [are cheap to buy]. There is also a particularly lovely and rather strange variety, green with a black centre, Ixia viridiflora, more expensive [and difficult to find but worth it.] …

‘Of course, the more you can plant, the better. They flower in June and take up very little room. They are ideal for picking, as they last a long time in water and arrange themselves with thin and slender elegance in a tall glass.

‘They do also very well as pot-plants in a cold greenhouse or a conservatory, not requiring any heat but only protection from frost. If you grow them this way, you must disregard the advice to plant them six inches deep, and cover them with only an inch or so of soil – sandy loam and a handful of leaf-mould mixed to each pot, and crocks for drainage at the bottom.’

Vita liked the small-flowered, delicate butterfly gladiolus. She recommends planting in March, or any time at intervals between March and May, to get a succession for picking from midsummer. Many people have reservations about gladioli, associating them with the huge-flowered hybrid varieties made famous by Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna. Vita was not keen on these, but the butterfly types with fine structured flowers in pretty colours make excellent cut flowers, and she liked them. They are, as she says, surprisingly perennial if mulched six inches deep for the frosty winter months:

‘I am never quite sure what I feel about the [large-flowered hybrid] gladioli. Handsome, yes; wonderful in colour, yes; helpful for picking, yes; invaluable in the August–September garden, providing colour at a time of year when flowers are becoming scarce, yes; supreme in the late summer flower shows, yes, in those great peacock-tail displays like swords dipped in all the hues of sunrise, sunset and storm. Here I come to a full stop and start saying No. I don’t like their habit of fading at the bottom before they have come out at the top. I don’t like the top-heaviness which entails staking if you are to avoid a mud-stained flower flattened to the ground. Finally, I don’t like the florist-shop look of them. No, take it all round, I cannot love the big gladiolus. It touches not my heart.

‘The little Gladiolus primulinus is a far less massive thing. Not so showy, perhaps, but more delicate to the fastidious taste. They can be had in an astonishing range of colour. If you want named varieties you will have to pay for them, but you can also get a mixture quite cheaply.

‘They are as showy as the dahlia and far less of a nuisance, for I have proved to my satisfaction over a number of years that they can be left in the ground through the winter – yes, even the winter of 1956 – and will reappear at the appropriate moment. There was a colony I did not much like, and could not be bothered to dig up and store, so left them to take their chance, almost hoping that they would miss it; but there they were again, and have been ever since. I suppose the corms had originally been planted fairly deep, at least 6 to 8 inches, and thus escaped the hardest freezing of the ground.

‘I know that what I am saying goes against all orthodox advice, but can only record my own experience. Don’t blame me if it goes wrong for you.

‘I like calling the gladiolus the Sword-flower. The name goes right back to the elder Pliny, who gave it that name as a diminutive of gladius, a sword; Pliny, a gardener and a naturalist, who got overwhelmed by the eruption of Vesuvius over Pompeii, 1,878 years ago.

‘Pliny would certainly have been amazed by our twentieth-century garden hybrids. He might, and probably would, have preferred them to the species indigenous to the Mediterranean, which is all he can have known. I should disagree with Pliny: I like the little gladioli far better than the huge things so heavy that they need staking. I like the primulinus and the so-called butterfly gladioli, in their soft colouring and their hooded habit of turning back a petal, rather after the fashion of a cyclamen. I remember – could I ever forget? – picking a bunch of little wild gladioli at sunset off a mountain in Persia and putting them in a jam-jar on the wooden crate that served as our supper-table in our camping place.

‘They made all the garden hybrids look more vulgar than Hollywood.’

Moving on from bulbs for summer and autumn flowering, Vita writes enthusiastically about the currently out-of-fashion alstroemerias. And rightly so – they flower for months and have an exceptional vase life of up to three weeks. The Ligtu Hybrids, the commonest ones available in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, are great doers, but almost too much so. My mother planted some beneath standard roses in her formal front garden and they filled the bed in no time and were then tricky to contain.

This is not true of lots of new florists’ varieties, which have been bred to be better-behaved. ‘Friendship’ and ‘Elvira’ are my modern favourites, both with stupendously long flowering seasons from May until almost Christmas in a mild year. If you keep pulling them or cutting them right to the ground if they go over, they’re quick to re-emerge and flower. They make a good simple vase, their tall, arching stems at least three foot high. The key with picking alstroemerias is to pull them, like rhubarb, rather than cut their stems.

‘There are some moments when I feel pleased with my garden, and other moments when I despair,’ Vita admits. ‘The pleased moments usually happen in spring, and last up to the middle of June. By that time all the freshness has gone off; everything has become heavy; everything has lost that adolescent look, that look of astonishment at its own youth. The middle-aged spread has begun.’ Goodness, don’t we all know that feeling, when the garden suddenly seems out of control, not enough staking done early on, and the really strong weeds, the nettles and thistles, romping away, the whole place already feeling tired – and with only half the year gone.

‘It is then,’ says Vita, ‘that the Alstroemerias come into their own. Lumps of colour just when you need them … Alstroemerias or Peruvian lilies are rather oddly named since they all come from Chile or Brazil. They are just coming into flower, (now in late June) and should be at their best during the next two or three weeks, so this is the time to see them and judge for yourself. The common old rather dingy form, A. aurantiaca, is no longer worth growing, when you can have such superb varieties as A. haemantha, like the inside of a blood orange, or the Ligtu hybrids, which burst into every shade of colour from a strawy-buff to a coral rose, and apart from their garden value are among the loveliest of flowers for picking, since they not only arrange themselves in graceful curves in water but last for an unusually long time.

‘A bed of Alstroemeria Ligtu hybrids in full sun is a glowing sight. A. haemantha glows even more richly, though you may object that a flaming red-orange is an awkward colour to manage in a small garden. Personally I should like to grow half an acre of them, somewhere in the distance, if only in order to hear people gasp.

‘May I insist on two or three points for growing them, dictated to me by practical experience? First, grow them from seed, sown on the spot where you wish them to continue their existence. This is because the roots are extremely brittle, and they loathe being transplanted. So suspicious are they of transplantation that even seedlings carefully tipped out of pots seem to sense that something precarious and unsettling is happening to them, and resent it in the unanswerable way of plants by the simple protest of death. Second, sow them either when the seed is freshly harvested, or, better still, in early spring. Third, sow them in a sunny, well-drained place. Fourth, cover them over with some protective litter such as bracken for the first winter. After observing all these instructions you will not have to worry about them any more, beyond staking them with twiggy sticks as soon as they reappear every year 6 in. above the ground, for the stems are fragile and easily broken down by wind or heavy rain. You will find that the clumps increase in size and beauty, with self-sown seedlings coming up all over the near neighbourhood.’

There were a few other cut flowers Vita grew from seed, mostly in lines in the Kitchen Garden. She particularly cherished the annual ‘Chabaud’ carnation and tried to persuade everyone to grow them. She loved the fleck and stipple of their petals – which, as she said, were straight out of a Dutch still-life:

‘There are two sorts of carnations, the annual and the perennial. The annuals are divided into the Giant Chabaud, the Enfant de Nice, and the Compact Dwarf. They should be sown in February or March in boxes of well-mixed leaf-mould, soil and sharp sand. They require no heat; but in frosty weather the seedlings should be protected. Do not over-water. Keep them on the dry side. Plant them out when they are large enough, in a sunny place with good drainage. (I think myself that they look best in a bed by themselves, not mixed in with other plants.) Their colour range is wide: yellow, white, red, purple, pink, and striped. They are extremely prolific, and if sown in February should be in flower from July onwards. If you care to take the trouble, they can be lifted in October and potted, to continue flowering under glass or indoors on a window-sill, i.e. safely away from frost, well into the winter.

‘“Carnation” is perhaps a misleading term, since to most people, myself included, carnation suggests a greenhouse plant of the Malmaison type; an expensive buttonhole for a dandy at Ascot or Lord’s. The Chabaud carnations are more like what we think of as our grandmothers’ pinks, as pretty and scented as anyone could desire. They can be had in self-colours, or flaked and striped like the pinks in old flower-paintings; with their old-fashionable look they associate perfectly with the Damask and Gallica and Cabbage roses.’

Vita knew how important it is to grow plenty of good summer foliage plants as well as flowers if you want to pick bunches for the house. Dill is one of the best and easiest-to-grow of these, and Vita encouraged lots of it to self-sow.

‘May I put in a good word for Dill?’ she asks. ‘It is, I think, extremely pretty, both in the garden and picked for indoors, perhaps especially picked for indoors, where it looks like a very fine golden lace, feathery amongst the heavy flat heads of yarrow, Achillea eupatorium, one of the most usual herbaceous plants to be found in any garden.

‘Dill, of course, is not an herbaceous plant; it is an annual, but it sows itself so prolifically that one need never bother about its renewal. It sees to that for itself, and comes up year after year where you want it and in many places where you don’t. It has many virtues, even if you do not rely upon it “to stay the hiccough, being boiled in wine”, or to “hinder witches of their will”. Amongst its virtues, apart from its light yellow grace in a mixed bunch of flowers, is the fact that you can use its seeds to flavour vinegar, and for pickling cucumbers. You can also, if you wish, use the young leaves to flavour soups, sauces, and fish. All mothers know about Dill-water, but few will want to go to the trouble of preparing that concoction for themselves, so on the whole the most practical use the cook or the housewife will find for this pretty herb lies in the harvest of its seeds, which are indistinguishable from caraway seeds in seed-cake or rolled into scones or into the crust of bread. Once she has got it going in her garden, she need never fear to be short of supply for seed-cake, since one ounce is said to contain over twenty-five thousand seeds; and even if she has got a few seeds left over out of her thousands she can keep them waiting, for they will still be viable after three years.

Dill – Anethum graveolens.

‘The correct place for Dill is the herb garden, but if you have not got a herb garden it will take a very decorative place in any border. I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.

‘By the way, the official botanical name of Dill is Peucedanum graveolens [now Anethum], for the information of anyone who does not prefer the short monosyllable, as I do.’

Along the same lines, she loved bells of Ireland (Moluccella laevis), one of the best and longest-lasting annual foliage plants you can grow. It can be tricky to germinate. Try putting the seed in the freezer for a week before you sow – that usually jolts it into life. Then it lasts for many weeks in a vase and will dry for arrangements through the winter. Here’s what Vita says about it:

‘Have you grown Molucella laevis? It was introduced into this country from Syria in 1570, nearly 400 years ago, and seems to have been somewhat neglected until a recent revival of its popularity. I tried it and was disappointed when it first came up; then, as it developed, I saw that it did deserve its other name, the Shell-flower, and from being disappointed I came round to an affection for it. One must be patient with it, for it takes some leisurely summer weeks before it shows what it intends to do.

‘I was given to understand that it could be picked and kept in a vase indoors throughout the winter, but alas the ruthless hoe came along before I had time to arrest it, and my Shell-flower got carted off on to the rubbish heap.’

She also had a soft spot for the white and green variegated Euphorbia marginata – ‘an old friend, a hardy annual spurge, more attractively known as Snow-on-the-mountain. It grows about 2 ft. high; its long pointed, pale-green leaves are edged with white, some of them coming white altogether, and in place of flowers it produces pure white bracts. Not only is it extremely effective, but it has the merit of lasting for months.’ This makes an excellent garden and vase foliage plant, but can also be tricky to grow. I find it does best – particularly in a wet summer – under cover, growing in a greenhouse.

AUTUMN

One of the very best bulbs for picking and for containers, from late summer right through the autumn, is the scented cousin of the gladiolus, Acidanthera murieliae. One of Vita’s favourite late-flowering bulbs, she describes it as a ‘lovely, fragrant thing’, ‘an exquisite dandy’. Acidanthera has a delicacy and fineness – a painterliness – typical of the species wild gladiolus, which she much preferred to the larger, coarser hybrids:

‘It is, perhaps, a thing for the choosy fastidious gardener, not for the gardener who wants a great splash. It will not give a showy display. Perhaps, above all, it is to be cherished for cutting, when you get the full benefit of the strong, sweet scent. Slender and graceful, on wiry stems two to three feet high, with starry white flowers blotched with a maroon centre, it comes from the aromatic hills of Abyssinia, so we may truly say of it that it hangs “like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear”, and may say also that it likes the sunniest, driest place, and likes to be taken up for the winter and stored away from frost and damp.’

For flowers right through until November, plant a batch every couple of weeks in succession from March until May or June. It takes a hundred days from planting to flower.

Another autumn-flowering bulb, or strictly speaking a rhizomatous perennial, useful for picking, is the Kaffir lily, or schizostylis (now called Hesperantha), a valuable stalwart which Vita planted in various patches in the garden such as on the edge of the moat and around the Lion Pond. That’s the sort of conditions it likes – a moist soil with good drainage, in a sunny, sheltered spot.

‘I would recommend the Kaffir Lily,’ she says, ‘officially called Schizostylis coccinea, with its pretty pink variety called Mrs. Hegarty. It resembles a miniature gladiolus, and it has the advantage, from our point of view, of flowering in October and November, when it is difficult to find anything out of doors for indoor picking.

Kaffir lily – Schizostylis coccinea.

‘The Kaffir Lily [is not an expensive plant]. One dozen will give you a good return, if you plant them in the right sort of place and look after them properly. Planting them in the right sort of place means giving them a light, well-drained soil in full sun. Looking after them properly means that you must give them plenty of water during their growing period, when their leaves are throwing up, rather as you would treat an amaryllis, the Belladonna lily. You should realize that they are not entirely hardy, especially in our colder counties; but they are reasonably hardy in most parts of England; a thin quilt of bracken or dry leaves next winter will keep them safe for years. It is remarkable what a little covering of bracken will do for bulbs. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine anything less adequate than a draughty scatter of bracken on a frosty night, give me a thick eiderdown and blankets every time, and a hot-water bottle, too, but bulbs which are buried deep down in the earth will keep themselves warm and safe with the thinnest cover from frost above them.’

By the middle of autumn, finding plenty to pick for a vase inside becomes more of a challenge, but the question of which flowers to pick for October onwards was an important one for Vita. For that reason she became ‘very fond of [the] modest rose, Stanwell perpetual, who truly merits the description perpetual. One is apt to overlook her during the great foison of early summer; but now in October, when every chosen flower is precious, I feel grateful to her for offering me her shell-pink, highly-scented, patiently-produced flowers, delicately doing her job again for my delectation in a glass on my table, and filling my room with such a good smell that it puffs at me as I open the door.

‘Stanwell perpetual grows taller than the average Scots rose. It grows four to five feet high. It is … a hybrid. It has another name, according to Miss Nancy Lindsay, who is an expert on these old roses, the Victorian Valentine rose. This evokes pictures of old Valentines – but, however that may be, I do urge you to plant Stanwell perpetual in your garden to give you a reward of picking in October.’

Another good rose for autumn and even winter picking is ‘Comtesse du Cayla’, mentioned earlier. At Sissinghurst this is in the toolshed bed where Vita had it, easy to pick just outside the South Cottage, and is still used – just the odd flower – for putting in a single-stem vase on Vita’s desk. She describes it in 1952 in In Your Garden Again: ‘… a China rose, so red in the stem on young wood as to appear transparent in a bright light; very pointed in the coral-coloured bud; very early to flower, continuing to flower throughout the summer until the frosts come (I once picked a bunch on Christmas morning); somewhat romantic in her associations, for the lady in whose honour she is named was the mistress of Louis XVIII; altogether a desirable rose, not liable to black spot or mildew; needing little pruning apart from the removal of wood when it has become too old, say, every two or three years.’

There is callicarpa too, the purple-bead shrub which looks nothing for most of the year, but in autumn emerges with a dash of glamour you’d almost forgotten it’s capable of. It’s good to have a few plants like this, parts of the chorus who step forward to bowl you over, if only for a short time. Vita says it ‘gives some colour in November and December, also looks pretty in a glass under an electric lamp. The flowers, which come earlier in the year, are inconspicuous; the point is the deep-mauve berry, growing close to the stem in clusters, about the size of those tiny sugar-coated sweets which children call Hundreds and Thousands. I doubt if it would be hardy enough for very bleak or northern districts, though it should do well in a sunny corner in a line south of the Wash, as the weather reports say; it came undamaged through 18 degrees of frost in my garden last winter.

‘There is one vital thing to remember about Callicarpa: it is one of those sociable plants which like company of their own kind, so you must put at least two or three in a clump together, otherwise you won’t get the berries. It is not a question of male and female plants, as, for example, with the Sea Buckthorn, which will not give its orange fruits unless married; the explanation appears to be simply that it enjoys a party.

‘This, of course, is true of many of the berrying shrubs, as well as of many human beings.

‘I am told that it makes a pretty pot-plant, grown in a single stem, when the berries cluster even more densely, all the way up. Here, again, it would be necessary to have several pots, not only one.’

Hardy chrysanthemums come into their own for this moment in the year, but as Vita points out, you need to take care to grow the right ones. There are plenty of good-looking chrysanths, but there are plenty of ugly ones too. She liked the garden singles – the Korean varieties – rather than the great pom-pom greenhouse types. One of the reasons people love to hate chrysanths is that they have such a long vase life and have become too commonplace. But they are such good value, so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water – find a few varieties you like, because there’s nothing better for picking towards the end of the year.

Always keen to be one step ahead, Vita would lose no time: ‘The day after Christmas Day … we may begin to look forward to the next great happy feast of the Church, Easter, knowing that the evenings are gradually lengthening and that the moment has come to examine the catalogues and to decide on what we are going to order.

‘One must look forward, but one must also look back. Looking back, we shall probably remember that there was an ugly blank gap from the middle of November onwards. The ordinary Korean chrysanthemums lasted extremely well, and even put out a fresh crop of flowers after a touch of frost; they are truly invaluable plants, with none of the coarseness of the greenhouse monsters (I know I shall get into trouble for saying this), and they may now be had in a variety of ravishing colours: a dusty pink, a bracken brown, a brick red, a maize yellow, a port wine red, and many others which you will find enumerated in the nurserymen’s lists. This is the time to order them for spring delivery, if you have not already got some which you wish to increase. If you have, you can take cuttings off them any time between now and March, from the shoots which come from the roots, and dibble them into sandy soil in pots or boxes. They root more readily if you can keep them in a greenhouse with a temperature of 40 deg. to 45 deg.

‘It is probably quite unnecessary for me to tell anyone how to take chrysanthemum cuttings, since it is the common practice, and I set out with no such purpose. What I really wanted to mention was a late-flowering section of the Koreans, to carry us on over that awkward time in late November and December. These do best, i.e., go on flowering longer, if they can be lifted from the open ground and kept in pots or boxes in a cold greenhouse, for picking for indoors, which is what one wants at that time of year. You can get these in five different sorts: Crimson Bride, Lilac Time, Primrose Day, Red Letter Day and Wedding Day. As its name suggests, Wedding Day is white and claims to be the first white Korean to be put on the market.

‘There is another section of the Koreans, called the dwarf or cushion Koreans. These grow only to 1 ft. or 18 in. high, and are thus ideal plants for the front edge of a border, or for a windy place. They flower profusely throughout August, September, October, and into November, according to the varieties you choose, and share the same lovely range of colour as their taller cousins.

‘Order all your Korean plants now, for delivery next spring. They will look tiny and scrimpy when they arrive, but they will grow into big plants by the end of the summer.’

As with the first two months of the year, having flowers to pick during the last two, when the garden was dingy and the weather not beckoning you outside, was a Vita priority. As she says, ‘I find, and do not doubt that most people will agree with me, that November and December are quite the bleakest months of the year for finding “something to pick for indoors” … I propose to suggest some things that everybody can grow with a prophetic eye on next winter so that the usual blank period may not occur again. These will be things that flourish out of doors. I am not here concerned with greenhouses.’ What she had in mind were a few flowering shrubs, some with good berries, as well as one or two roses that were invaluable for their hips at this late stage in the year, both in the garden and for the vase. And with less around, it was time for the return of the tussie-mussie (or ‘tuzzy-muzzy’), the little mixed bunch – one or two sprigs of several different things tied together:

Rosa ‘Fru Dagmar Hastrup’ hips in frost.

‘Prowling round through the drizzle with knife and secateurs, I collected quite a presentable tuzzy-muzzy. Some bits were scented; some were merely pretty; and few of them had been grown with a special view to picking in November.

‘Among the scented bits were Viburnum Bodnantense and Viburnum fragrans; some sprigs of Daphne retusa; a few stray roses, notably the Scots Stanwell perpetual and the hybrid musk Penelope who goes on and on, untiringly, and whose every bud opens in water. To these I added some lemon-scented verbena and some ivy-leaved geranium; they had been growing all summer in the open and had not yet suffered from frost.

‘Viburnum fragrans will start producing its apple-blossom flowers in November, and unless interrupted by a particularly severe frost will carry on until March. It is a shrub growing eventually to a height of ten or twelve feet; it is extremely hardy; easy-going as to soil; and has the merit of producing a whole nursery of children in the shape of young self-rooted shoots. Picked and brought into a warm room, it is very sweet scented.

‘Among the scentless but more brightly coloured bits, I still had some gentians and some cyclamen neapolitanum, both pink and white, coming up through their beautifully marbled leaves which, if you look carefully, are seen to be never quite the same from plant to plant. They surprise with their infinite variety, more innocently than Cleopatra surprised her Antony.

‘Then I picked some sprays of Abutilon megapotamicum – it does not last well, once cut [for more on this see here] – which has been flowering since last June and shows no sign of stopping until a bad frost hits it. It grows against a south wall and is given some protection in winter, not very much protection, just a heap of coarse ashes over its roots and a curtain of hessian or sacking drawn across it when the weather becomes very severe.

‘I found some fine heads of polyanthus, entirely out of season, the blue Californian variety and some of the butter-and-cream Munstead, raised by Miss Gertrude Jekyll, that grand gardener to whom we owe so much. That was not a bad little bunch from out-of-doors in November.’

Finally, as Vita says, some of the rose leaves and hips are good for vases before they shrivel or drop: ‘The leaves of the rugosa rose, Blanc de Coubert, in either the single or the double form [I think there is only a double now available], also turn a very beautiful yellow at this time of year and are good for picking. This rose has every virtue; the flowers are intensely sweet-scented, they persist all through the summer, they are succeeded by bright red hips in autumn, as round as little apples, and the whole bush is a blaze of gold in November. The only disadvantage, for a small garden, might be the amount of room the bush takes up; it is a strong grower, like most of the rugosas, and will eventually spread to a width of four or five feet and to a height of a tall man. It is, however, very shapely, with its rounded head, and it never straggles.’

DECEMBER AND CHRISTMAS

‘We are into December, Mid-winter-monath in old Saxon, and what a difficult time it is to produce flowers to fill even a few vases in the house!’ Vita laments in 1954.

It’s easy for us to get tempted to buy stuff – amaryllis, lilies, bowls of forced hyacinths and ‘Paper White’ narcissi – but there’s something nicer about picking as much as possible to decorate your house from the garden, even if it’s quite a challenge.

‘The weeks between December 1st and January 1st are probably the most awkward from the point of view of the gardener who is asked to produce something to pick for the house. He, poor man, is expected to supply a succession of bunches and branches to enliven the rooms, especially over Christmas. His chrysanthemums are all over; and a good thing too, if they were those shaggy things the size of an Old English Sheepdog’s face. The far lovelier Korean chrysanthemums were over long ago, unless he had facilities for keeping them under glass. He must fall back on the autumn-flowering cherry, on the winter jasmine, on Viburnum fragrans, on the berrying cotoneasters, on the waxy tassels and red fruits of Arbutus unedo if he had the foresight to plant one in his garden years ago. There is very little else that he can find except a few stray Algerian iris poking up through their untidy leaves.

Prunus subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’ – autumn-flowering cherry.

‘I am in deep sympathy with this worried gardener, being a worried gardener myself, with a house clamouring for flowers when I haven’t got any.’

It is to the autumn-flowering cherry (see here), the winter jasmine (see here), Viburnum fragrans (see here), the berrying cotoneasters and berberis, as well as Arbutus unedo, that Vita turns:

‘One has to fall back upon the berried plants and amongst these I think Cotoneaster rugosa Henryii is one of the best. It is a graceful grower, throwing out long, red-berried sprays, with dark green, pointed, leathery leaves of especial beauty. It is not fussy as to soil and will flourish either in sun or shade, in fact, it can even be trained against a north wall, which is always one of the most difficult sites to find plants for in any garden. Berberis Thunbergii, either the dwarf form or the variety called purpurea, both so well known that perhaps they need no recommendation, will also thrive in sun or shade, and at this time of year flame into the sanguine colours of autumn. They should be planted in clumps in some neglected corner, and be left to take care of themselves until the time comes to cut them for what professional florists call “indoor decoration”, but what you and I call, more simply, something to fill the flower vases with. They have the additional merit of lasting a very long time in water.’

One of the loveliest things for Christmas picking, and particularly brilliant for adding long-lasting colour to festive door wreaths, is the strawberry tree Arbutus unedo, with its strawberry-crossed-with-lychee fruits at their best exactly now, for Christmas. ‘[It is] not very often seen in these islands, except in south-west Eire, where it grows wild, but is an attractive evergreen of manageable size and accommodating disposition. True, most varieties object to lime, belonging as they do to the family of ericaceae, like the heaths and the rhododendrons, but the one called Arbutus unedo can safely be planted in any reasonable soil.

‘To enumerate its virtues. It is, as I have said, evergreen. It will withstand sea-gales, being tough and woody. It has an amusing, shaggy, reddish bark. It can be grown in the open as a shrub, or trained against a wall, which perhaps shows off the bark to its fullest advantage, especially if you can place it where the setting sun will strike on it, as on the trunk of a Scots pine. Its waxy, pinkish-white flowers, hanging like clusters of tiny bells among the dark green foliage, are useful for picking until the first frost of November browns them; a drawback which can be obviated by a hurried picking when frost threatens. And, to my mind, its greatest charm is that it bears flower and fruit at the same time, so that you get the strawberry-like berries dangling red beneath the pale flowers. These berries are edible, but I do not recommend them. According to Pliny, who confused it with the real strawberry, the word unedo, from unum edo, means “I eat one”, thus indicating that you don’t come back for more.

‘After its virtues, its only fault: it is not quite hardy enough for very cold districts, or for the North.’

There are a couple of other plants which Vita liked for December vases and which are particularly useful for Christmas wreaths – celastrus and our native stinking iris (Iris foetidissima), which both have brilliantly coloured orange berries and last well in or out of water.

‘[In] November and December … [o]ne has to fall back on the berrying plants; and amongst these I would like to recommend the seldom-grown Celastrus orbiculatus. This is a rampant climber, which will writhe itself up into any old valueless fruit tree, apple or pear, or over the roof of a shed, or over any space not wanted for anything more choice. It is rather a dull green plant during the summer months; you would not notice it then at all; but in the autumn months of October and November it produces its butter-yellow berries which presently break open to show the orange seeds, garish as heraldry, gules and or, startling to pick for indoors when set in trails against dark wood panelling, but equally lovely against a white-painted wall.

‘It is a twisting thing. It wriggles itself into corkscrews, not to be disentangled, but this does not matter because it never needs pruning unless you want to keep it under control. My only need has been to haul it down from a tree into which it was growing too vigorously; a young prunus, which would soon have been smothered. Planted at the foot of an old dead or dying tree, it can be left to find its way upwards and hang down in beaded swags, rich for indoor picking, like thousands of tiny Hunter’s moons coming up over the eastern horizon on a frosty night.’

The wild Iris foetidissima, with its orange seeds filling its shiny green pods in December, is another stalwart: ‘A spike of the brightest orange caught my eye, half hidden by a clump of Berberis Thunbergii which had turned very much the same colour. They were both of an extraordinary brilliance in the low afternoon sunshine. I could not remember if I had planted them deliberately in juxtaposition, or if they had come together by a fortunate chance. Investigation revealed further spikes: three-sided seed-pods cracked wide open to expose the violent clusters of the berries within. This was our native Iris foetidissima in its autumn dress, our only other native iris being the yellow waterside flag, I. pseudo-acorus …

‘No one would plant I. foetidissima for the sake of its name, which in English is rendered the Stinking iris and derives from the unpleasant smell of the leaves if you bruise them. There is, however, no need to bruise leaves, a wanton pastime, and you can call it the Gladdon or Gladwyn iris if you prefer, or even the Roast-beef Plant. Some etymologists think that Gladdon or Gladwyn are corruptions of Gladiolus, owing to a similarity between the sword-like leaves; but I wish someone would tell me how it got its roast-beef name.

‘Its flowers, small, and of a dingy mauve, are of no value or charm, nor should we be wise to pick them, because it is for the seed pods that we cherish it. Not that it needs much cherishing, and is even one of those amiable plants that will tolerate shade. Strugglers with shady gardens, or with difficult shaded areas, will doubtless note this point. The seedpods are for late autumn and winter decoration indoors, for the seeds have the unusual property of not dropping out when the pod bursts open, and will last for a long time in a vase; they look fine, and warm, under a table-lamp on a bleak evening. Miss Gertrude Jekyll used to advise hanging the bunch upside down for a bit, to stiffen the stalks; I dare say she was right; she was usually right, and had an experimental mind.

‘Let me not claim for the Gladdon iris that its crop of orange berries makes a subtle bunch or one which would appeal to flower-lovers of very delicate taste; it is frankly as coarse as it is showy, and has all the appearance of having been brought in by a pleased child after an afternoon’s ramble through the copse. Nevertheless, its brightness is welcome, and its coarseness can be lightened by a few sprays of its companion the berberis.’

Vita liked to have a few skeletal seedpods for winter decoration – and none better than alliums, brilliant June and July garden plants and something we should all collect for winter vases and Christmas decorations. You want to harvest them in July and August, before they get blown to pieces by the wind and rain of autumn, and then spray them silver for the Christmas tree. You can stand well away from the tree and just throw the alliums at it and they stick. The complex structure of their heads meeting the spines of the fir makes a firm union without any ribbon or string. That’s how I decorate our tree at Sissinghurst – with mainly natural things including lots of different alliums such as Allium rosenbachianum, A. hollandicum, A. christophii and the vast sparkler heads of A. schubertii, one of these perfect for the top of the tree.

Dried allium christophii heads for winter decoration.

Finally for Christmas, Vita always had a bunch of mistletoe, ‘pearled and dotted with tiny moons’, and was keen to encourage the odd clump to establish itself in the trees in the orchard:

‘Shakespeare called [mistletoe] baleful; but, as everybody knows, it is possessed of most serviceable properties if only you treat it right. It can avert lightning and thunderbolts, witchcraft and sorcery; it can extinguish fire; it can discover gold buried in the earth; it can cure ulcers and epilepsy; it can stimulate fertility in women and cattle. On the other hand, if you do not treat it right it can do dreadful things to you. It may even kill you as it killed Balder the Beautiful, whose mother neglected to exact an oath from it not to hurt her son “because it seemed too young to swear”.

‘The important thing, therefore, seems to be to learn as quickly and thoroughly as possible how to treat it right.

‘You must never cut it with iron, but always with gold. You must never let it touch the ground, but must catch it in a white cloth as it falls. This seems easy compared with the first stipulation, since even in these days most people do still possess a white cloth of some sort, a sheet, or a large handkerchief, whereas few of us can command a golden bagging-hook or even a knife with a blade of pure gold. You must never put it into a vase but must always suspend it, and after every traditional kiss the man must pick off one fruit – which is not a berry, although it looks like one – and when all the fruits have gone the magic of the kiss has gone also.

‘Folk-tales? He would be a bold man who attempted to explain or to explain away such ancient and widespread superstitions, ranging from furthest Asia into Europe and Africa. Mysterious and magical throughout all countries and all centuries, these tales may be read in Sir James Frazer’s monumental work in which he honoured that queer parasite, the mistletoe, with the title The Golden Bough.’

Mistletoe is just as popular now as it was in Vita’s day, grown in the old fruit orchards of Hereford and Shropshire, which are at the heart of its trade. There are still mistletoe auctions in Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire, where people travel from all corners to bid for great bundles to break up and sell in the buildup to Christmas.

Vita goes on to say: ‘So here let me concentrate rather on some botanical facts which Sir James Frazer disregards, and try to correct some popular misconceptions about the nature of the mistletoe.

‘We think of it as a parasite, but it is not a true parasite, only a semi-parasite, meaning that it does not entirely depend upon its host for nourishment, but gains some of its life from its own leaves. It belongs to an exceptional family, the Loranthaceae, comprising more than five hundred members, only one of which is a British-born subject – Viscum album, the Latin name for our English mistletoe.

‘The mistletoe, as we know it, grows on some trees and not on others. The worst mistake that we make is to believe that it grows most freely on the oak. It seldom does; and that is the reason why the Druids particularly esteemed the oak-borne mistletoe, for this was a rarity and thus had a special value. The mistletoe prefers the soft-barked trees: the apple, the ash, the hawthorn, the birch, the poplar, the willow, the maple, the Scots pine, the sycamore, the lime, and the cedar. It is seldom found on the pear, the alder, or the beech; and is most rare on the oak.

‘Another popular mistake concerning the propagation of this queer plant. It is commonly believed that birds carry the seeds. This is only half true. What really happens, by one of those extraordinarily complicated arrangements which Nature appears to favour, is that the bird (usually the missel-thrush) pecks off the white fruit for the sake of the seed inside it, and then gets worried by the sticky mess round the seed [which is indeed as sticky as chewing gum] and wipes his beak, much as we might wipe our muddy shoes on a doormat, and thereby deposits the seed in a crack of the bark, where it may, or may not, germinate.’

If you want to propagate it yourself and not leave it to the birds, ‘save the Christmas decorations; or, better still, get some fresh berries in February or March’, Vita urges. ‘These will be less withered and stand a better chance of germination. Squeeze the berry until it bursts, and stick the seed to the underside of a healthy young twig by means of the natural glue. Stick as many seeds as possible, to ensure a good percentage of germination, and also to ensure getting more than one plant, necessary for purposes of fertilization; in other words, you won’t get berries if you haven’t more than one plant. The best host-trees are the apple and the poplar, and you can be very successful also in starting it on hawthorns. Some people advocate cutting or scraping the twig before sticking the seed on to it, but you’ll get the best results from a healthy shoot with a smooth and clean bark.

‘After all this, apparently, you have to be very patient. The infant plant, always assuming that germination has taken place, will do very little for the first two years of its life. In its first April, that is to say a couple of months after it has been sown, it ought to show a green disc or finger, and that is all it will do until the following spring, when the first two leaves ought to appear, and after that it ought to go on increasing “at a rate of a geometrical progression”, until such time as you can cut your own berried bunch instead of buying it, to hang over the dinner-table.

‘It sounds all right and feasible, and would in any case be an amusing experiment for the amateur with a bit of extra leisure and an orchard of old apple trees to practise on. Commercially, it might prove profitable. Our Christmas mistletoe is quite expensive, and is, I understand, imported in vast quantities from abroad. Travellers between Calais and Paris must surely have noticed the lumps and clumps darkening like magpies’ nests the many neglected-looking strips of trees along the railway line in the North of France. Perhaps the neglect is deliberate; perhaps they pay a good dividend from all our markets, not only from Covent Garden.

‘Such are a few, a very few, legends and facts about the strange and wanton bunch we shall hang somewhere in our house this Christmas.’

CONDITIONING CUT FLOWERS

As an avid picker of home-grown flowers, Vita was keen to know all she could about the ways to extend the vase life of the plants she harvested, and she passed on the advice.

‘Perhaps I should entitle this article “In Your House”, or “Your Garden in Your House”, because I want to write something about cut flowers, inspired by an interesting letter from a gentleman describing himself as a botanist and horticulturist who has carried out researches on the subject [of making cut flowers last. In the spring] owners of gardens begin to pick more recklessly, with less dread of spoiling their outdoor show, but this pleasurable occupation does take a long time, and the busy woman wants to make her flowers last as long as possible.

‘“The cause of difficulties with cut flowers,” says my correspondent, “lies in the entry of air into the water-tubes of the flower stems during the period between cutting the flowers and placing them in water.” To prevent such disappointment, he recommends that you should place your newly cut flowers in recently boiled water while it is still just above tepid, i.e. not hot enough to sting your hand but warm enough to give your fingers an agreeable sensation of warmth.’ In my experiments with conditioning cut flowers I use just-off-boiling water, and know this to be very successful in extending the vase lives of most flowers. Particularly in the spring, when most stems are growing rapidly and so have little time to lay down any woodiness, or lignin, in their cell walls, I sear almost everything except bulbs (which do not need it – except for cut bluebells, which benefit from it hugely). By autumn, when stems have become more solid, it is much less important. Sear the bottom 10 per cent of the stem length.

‘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.’