4

A MIXTURE OF ALL THINGS

Vita had done a little rose and shrub planting in their first three years, but from 1934 she really began to pack the garden in her characteristically exuberant way. What had begun in the first couple of years as a few random favourites going in – such as the white rose ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, planted on the South Cottage, and Magnolia grandiflora in the Top Courtyard – grew into large-scale planting, with massive orders such as six hundred Lilium regale bulbs put in in that one year, plus a huge shrub order from Hillier’s nurseries – magnolias, prunus, viburnums, daphnes, sweet bay and lots of shrub roses.

She was mainly a plants person, someone who loved and wrote about individual varieties and new discoveries. But before she could get into that level of detail, she had to translate the vision she had for this place into the reality and come up with some sort of overall planting scheme. Vita seldom wrote about design, and if she did, would often just slip it in at the beginning or end of an article – very definitive, very sure that there was only one way of doing things. But it’s these themes, her style characteristics, her ideas for how to fill a garden, which define her as an individual gardener who had a lasting influence on English garden design.

There are several themes that are prominent, some more startling in the photographs of the garden from the 1940s or 50s than they are today: she liked a full range of plants all mixed up in the borders together, as you’d see in a cottage garden, rather than the smart gardens of her day; she had a sophisticated take on colour which led her to make her three gardens – the White Garden, the Purple Border and the sunset-coloured Cottage Garden – within a narrow colour range; she liked every inch of each bed, every corner and every surface of her garden to be abundant and luxuriant. She was a big fan of the flowering shrub, low maintenance, easy plants with a substantial presence, to give the beds valuable architecture; and she loved scent, strong and delicious garden perfumes, right through the year. It’s these themes, within its clever classical design, which make Sissinghurst the work of art it is.

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In many ways the planting Vita did at Sissinghurst was similar to her garden writing. In her columns she deliberately plays a game, dropping a thread of glamorous or exotic poetry, or a reference to the classics or to Milton, and then immediately afterwards comes straight down to the mundane – good growing tips, how to propagate, even how to make a concrete path look like stone.

If you look at her gardening pieces, she often launches into a great thing, a grand idea – then collapses it with a joke or something she hates, or a piece of practicality (see her passages on Coronilla glauca (here), myrtle (here) and Rosa filipes ‘Kiftsgate’ (here)). Here’s the good writer in a relaxed frame of mind, her style ranging from the poetic to the everyday, whisking up and down the octaves, never sticking safely to the stalwart middle range. It’s that breadth and fusion that makes her writing so good and rich to read, repaying a visit again and again.

You’ll also see this writing style in her garden. Her particular combination of qualities means that she achieves an atmosphere of great confidence – there’s nothing tentative or anxious, but a full-on going-for-it engagement with the place. The garden is jam-packed with a mix of very different sorts of plants, normally kept well apart in the gardens of her day – and that’s enlivening: high style, low style, big, delicate, careless and careful, all together.

Vita loved a riotous jumble, as you’d see in a good cottage garden, but she wanted a bit more structure than that. So she turned to William Robinson, ‘who did more to alter the fashions of English gardening than any man of his time’. The now very elderly garden designer had been experimenting in his own garden at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex since the 1880s.

Vita in her twenties.

The Edwardian gardens she’d been brought up with – at Knole, and the country houses she visited as a young woman – had long herbaceous beds, tiered from the front to the back, or carpet bedding: ‘flower-garden planting made up of a few kinds of flowers which people were proud to put out in thousands and tens of thousands’ in a highly ordered and structured way, as Vita wrote, quoting Robinson, in her collection of articles, Country Notes, published in 1939. Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne in Kent gave his gardener a full set of Asprey’s enamelled cigarette boxes and asked him to model the borders on them – ‘designs which may be quite all right on the surface of a carpet but not on the surface of the much enduring earth’, Vita commented.

‘There was hardly a country seat that was not marred by the idea of a garden as a conventional and patterned thing,’ William Robinson wrote in 1883, Vita adding that ‘the beds were regularly filled year after year with scarlet geraniums, pink begonias, discordant salvias, yellow calceolarias and greenhouse plants with variegated foliage. Nothing more hideous, unsuitable or unnatural could be imagined.’

Instinctively Vita knew that was not her thing. ‘I have no great love for herbaceous borders or for the plants that usually fill them – coarse things with no delicacy or quality about them. I think the only justification for such borders is that they shall be perfectly planned, both in regard to colour and to grouping; perfectly staked; and perfectly weeded. How many people have the time or the labour?’

As Robinson wrote in The English Flower Garden, ‘formality is often essential to the plan of a garden, but never to the arrangement of its flowers or shrubs’.

Victoria, Vita’s mother, in her formal ‘unnatural’ rose garden at Knole, typical of gardens at that time.

Vita’s planting at Sissinghurst in the 1950s.

‘The real originality of Mr Robinsons’s methods lay in his choice of what to grow and how to grow it,’ Vita writes in Country Notes. In The English Flower Garden and The Wild Garden, both books read by Vita, Robinson moved away from swathes of bedding annuals and perennials to the idea of ‘shrubs, pinks and pansies’ all in together. He was inspired by ‘the happy-go-lucky gardens of the poor cottagers, where no elaborate schemes had been adopted and flowers had been left to grow for themselves in a happy tangle’.

He went on to mix up all sorts of things together. Vita wrote: ‘In his own square beds … where he grew principally roses, he also grew clematis, whose purple clusters rose above low shrubs of silvery grey, and furthermore he covered the ground with pansies and even with low rock-plants, horrifying the rosarian whose conception of a rose garden had been one of savagely pruned bushes of uniform height, with bare ground in between.’ As Anne Scott-James says, he ‘commended such garden ideas as straight lines; blossoming hedges (roses, sweet briar, honeysuckle); creepers and ramblers on a house to clothe the fabric; roses, not trained as standards but well grouped and underplanted; the loose planting of shrubs in a border; borders crammed with successions of hardy flowers and bulbs; cottage gardens; climbers rambling up trees, or festooning hedges or creeping through shrubs’. Almost all these ideas were adopted and translated by Vita at Sissinghurst. His style became her style.

Following Robinson, she’d put shrubs together with herbaceous perennials. She’d position wild British natives, her favourite ‘wildlings’, next to exotics she’d got to know during her visits to Italy and Greece and her travels with Harold to Turkey and Persia. She’d put simple cottage flowers with a sweetness to them – wallflowers, poppies, large-flowered Roggli pansies, zinnias and dill – next to sophisticated foreigners – magnolias, abutilons, pomegranates and eremurus. Her garden would include a velvet Gallica rose with a wild honeysuckle left to climb through it and clamber up behind it on the wall; self-sown mulleins in a path, erupting through the purple skirts of an exotic indigofera; aubrieta – banned from smart gardens – in sweeping carpets frothing over the path at the feet of a great clump of her favourite imperial fritillary. Just like her writing, here was a hugely refined mishmash of so many different things, all combined in a luxuriant and glamorous way.

Luxurious mixed borders in the Rose Garden at Sissinghurst in the 1950s.

When knitting these groups of one thing, one style of plant, into another, she sometimes worked out her combinations, and sometimes left them a bit to chance and then tinkered with them, to fine-tune the colours and shapes of the design. When she was putting colours together, she tended to favour similar tones – like the blues of the rosemary, pansies and clematis at the entrance arch, preferring these calm, harmonious mixes to strong contrasts. She would sometimes think out these matches quite carefully, and give her readers a good tip for how to do the same:

‘I have a gardening dodge which I find very useful. It concerns colour-schemes and plant-groupings. You know how quickly one forgets what one’s garden has looked like during different weeks progressively throughout the year? One makes a mental note, or even a written note, and then the season changes and one forgets what one meant at the time. One has written “Plant something yellow near the yellow tulips,” or “Plant something tall behind the lupins,” and then autumn comes and plants have died down, and one scratches one’s head trying to remember what on earth one intended by that.

‘My system is more practical. I observe, for instance, a great pink, lacy crinoline of the May-flowering tamarisk, of which I put in two snippets years ago, and which now spreads the exuberance of its petticoats twenty feet wide over a neglected corner of the garden. What could I plant near it to enhance its colour? It must, of course, be something which will flower at the same time. So I try effects, picking flowers elsewhere, rather in the way that one makes a flower arrangement in the house, sticking them into the ground and then standing back to observe the harmony. The dusky, rosy Iris Senlac is just the right colour: I must split up my clumps as soon as they have finished flowering and make a group of those near the tamarisk for next May. The common pink columbine, almost a weed, would do well for under-planting, or some pink pansies, Crimson Queen, or the wine-red shades, as a carpet; and, for something really noble, the giant fox-tail lily, Eremurus robustus, eight to ten feet high. I cut, with reluctance, one precious spike from a distant group, and stick it in; it looks fine, like a cathedral spire flushed warm in the sunset. Undoubtedly I should have some eremuri next year with the plumy curtains of the tamarisk behind them, but the eremuri are too expensive and one cannot afford many of them.

‘This is just one example. One has the illusion of being an artist painting a picture – putting in a dash of colour here, taking out another dash of colour there, until the whole composition is to one’s liking, and at least one knows exactly what effect will be produced twelve months hence.’

Vita was also aware of balancing the rounded, bosomy shape with the odd tall spire. Then you’d get an interesting rhythm in a garden and prevent anything becoming too repetitive or dull. In July 1952 she writes in In Your Garden Again:

‘You see, I believe that one ought always to regard a garden in terms of architecture as well as of colour. One has huge lumps of, let us say, the shrub roses making large voluminous bushes like a Victorian crinoline, or flinging themselves about in wild sprays; or, putting it another way, some plants make round fat bushes, and seem to demand a contrast in a tall sharp plant, say delphiniums, sticking up in a cathedral spire of bright blue amongst the roses instead of in the orthodox way at the back of a herbaceous border. It is all a question of shape. Architectural shape, demanding the pointed thin ones amongst the fat rounds, as a minaret rises above the dome of a mosque.

‘Let me say here, for the small garden, that one might happily cause some spikes of the pink Linaria Canon J. Went to rise above a carpeting of low pansies or violas. This Linaria comes true from seed; sows itself everywhere like a welcome, not an unwelcome, weed; and is as pretty a thing as you could wish to have in quantities for picking for the house indoors.

‘Another fine thing to make great steeples is Yucca gloriosa. This will tower in a vast heavy ivory pyramid in July, of a powerful architectural value. It does not flower every year, so you must have at least three plants in order to get a yearly blooming, and for this you need a certain amount of space. I did begin by saying that this article would be addressed to people with the larger type of garden; but if the smaller garden can spare even three yards of room in a corner, Yucca gloriosa will come as a fine surprise on the grand scale in July, and will carry out my contention that you want variety of shape and height to make an aesthetic composition instead of just an amorphous muddle. The Yucca, being a child of the desert in Mexico and some of the hotter parts of the United States, such as California, likes the driest possible place and the sunniest, but on the whole accommodates itself very obligingly to our soil and climate.’

Vita when she met Harold.

She liked experimenting: Pam and Sybille have said that even in the last two years of her life, when as employees of the National Trust they overlapped with her in the garden, she’d sometimes turn up with something new and walk round until she found a good place to plant it. She was a firm believer in the view that ‘a good gardener makes experiments’, that ‘the fun of gardening is nothing unless you take reckless risks’; but you then have to be able to see and admit that your choices were not always right – and if wrong, you needed to change them.

She knew creating a brilliant garden is always about refinement – looking critically as often as you can, making notes of what’s good and what’s bad and if necessary moving things around until you have it right. ‘Gardening is largely a question of mixing one sort of plant with another sort of plant,’ she says, ‘and of seeing how they marry happily together; and if you see that they don’t marry happily, then you must hoick one of them out and be quite ruthless about it.

‘That is the only way to garden; and that is why I advise every gardener to go round his garden now – and make notes of what he thinks he ought to remove and of what he wants to plant later on.

‘The true gardener must be brutal, and imaginative for the future.’

Once plants were in and well established: ‘A bit of judicious cutting, snipping and chopping here and there will often make the whole difference. It may expose an aspect never noticed before, because overhanging branches had obscured it. It may reveal a coloured clump in the distance, hitherto hidden behind some overgrown bush of thorn or other unwanted rubbish. It is like being a landscape gardener on a small scale – and what gardener can afford to garden on the grand scale nowadays? It must also be like being a painter, giving the final touches to his canvas: putting just a dash of blue or yellow or red where it is wanted to complete the picture and to make it come together in a satisfactory whole.’

Both Vita and Harold and the gardeners since them have continually done this – refine, move, replant, until they were happy. As the garden designer Mary Keen said to me recently, ‘Some of her ideas might have ended in tears – the Clematis flammula or wisteria over a hedge, the more rampant roses up into smaller fruit trees – but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had a brilliant vision and her own ideas.’

The garden she made in the 1930s and tended in the 40s and 50s had a billowing freedom, a joyous informality, a great romance, which could not have been more different from that rather prescriptive Edwardian style she had been surrounded by in her youth. Sissinghurst was a glamorous garden but with slightly unkempt hair; the grand and the simple, side by side, each somehow making the other more marvellous; some things quite carefully planned, but cleverly feeling relaxed, free and easy. That fitted so well with the place they’d found, those crumbling walls of a romantic ruin.