5

A SOPHISTICATED PALETTE

The statue of a vestal virgin by Toma Rosandić under a weeping silver pear, surrounded by lambs’ ears in the White Garden – Stachys byzantina.

Vita’s vision for the White Garden, her Purple Border and the sunset-coloured Cottage Garden is perhaps her most lasting and copied garden legacy, not just at Sissinghurst, but around the world. When I asked the designer Dan Pearson what had influenced him most about the garden at Sissinghurst, he said it was the coloured rooms and particularly the hot colours of the Cottage Garden, which had inspired him in his Fire Garden at Home Farm (made famous by his TV series A Year at Home Farm).

Under the influence of garden designers such as William Robinson and Getrude Jekyll, the early twentieth century had begun to see gardens devoted to flowers of one colour or of one season, but Vita took this on another stage. She was clever with colour and had always had a sophisticated palette. As Harold said of her early days of gardening, ‘Vita only likes flowers which are brown and difficult to grow.’ She liked green flowers too – hellebores and euphorbias and the extraordinary green-flowered rose, which she grew in a pot next to the greenhouse. She had always been excited by unusual colour and had garden visions, like her dream of a verdigris garden, with flowers that were the blue-green of an old copper pot:

‘It is agreeable sometimes to turn for a change from the dutifully practical aspects of gardening to the consideration of something strange, whether we can hope to grow it for ourselves or not. A wet January evening seemed just the time for such an indulgence of dreams, and in an instant I found my room (which hitherto had boasted only a few modest bulbs in bowls) filling up with flowers of the queerest colours, shapes, and habits. The first batch to appear, thus miraculously conjured out of the air, were all of that peculiar blue-green which one observes in verdigris on an old copper, in a peacock’s feather, on the back of a beetle, or in the sea where the shallows meet the deep.

‘First came a slender South African, Ixia viridiflora, with green flowers shot with cobalt blue and a purple splotch: this I had once grown in a very gritty pan in a cold greenhouse, and was pleased to see again. Then came the tiny sea-green Persian iris, only three inches high, which I had seen piercing its native desert but had never persuaded into producing a single flower here. Then came Delphinium macrocentrum, an East African, which I had never seen at all, but which is said to rival the Chilean Puya alpestris in colouring.

‘Puya alpestris I knew. A ferocious-looking plant, and reluctant. Seven years had I cherished that thing in a pot, before it finally decided to flower. Then it threw up a spike and astonished everybody with its wicked-looking peacock trumpets and orange anthers, and side-shoots on which, apparently, humming-birds were supposed to perch and pollinate the flower. [This is still grown in the greenhouse and brought out in the summer when it’s in flower.]

‘And now here it was again, in my room, this time accompanied by the humming-birds which had been lamentably absent when I had flowered it after seven years. There were quite a lot of birds in my room by now, as well as flowers.’

She moves away from verdigris to exotic, cheerful thoughts for a grey January day: ‘For Strelitzia reginae had also arrived, escorted by the little African sun-birds which perch and powder their breast-feathers with its pollen. It is rare for plants to choose birds as pollinators instead of insects; and here were two of them. Strelitzia reginae itself looked like a bird, a wild, crested, pointed bird, floating on an orange boat under spiky sails of blue and orange. Although it had been called regina after Queen Charlotte the consort of George III, I preferred it under its other name, the Bird of Paradise Flower.

‘Then, as a change to homeliness, came clumps of the old primroses I had tried so hard to grow in careful mixtures of leaf-mould and loam, but here they were, flourishing happily between the cracks of the floorboards. Jack-in-the-Green, Prince Silverwings, Galligaskins, Tortoiseshell, Cloth of Gold; and as I saw them there in a wealth I had never been able to achieve, I remembered that the whole primula family was gregarious in its tastes and hated the loneliness of being one solitary, expensive little plant. They like huddling together, unlike the Lichens, which demand so little company that they will grow (in South America at any rate) strung out along the high isolation of telegraph wires.

‘There seemed indeed no end to the peculiarities of plants, whether they provided special perches for the convenience of their visitors, or turned carnivorous like the Pitcher-plants. Why was it that the Vine grew from left to right in the Northern hemisphere, but refused to grow otherwise than from right to left in the Southern? Why was the poppy called Macounii found only on one tiny Arctic island in the Behring Sea and nowhere else in the world? How had it come there in the first place? In a room now overcrowded with blooms of the imagination such speculations flowed easily, to the exclusion of similar speculations on the equally curious behaviour of men.

‘The walls of the room melted away, giving place to a garden such as the Emperors of China once enjoyed, vast in extent, varied in landscape, a garden in which everything throve and the treasures of the earth were collected in beauty and brotherhood. But a log fell in the fire: a voice said: “This is the B.B.C. Home Service; here is the news,” and I awoke.’

It’s from this instinct – love of the odd and the brave – that her ideas for a carefully composed and restricted palette grew. At Long Barn, she had made and loved a white and yellow garden. Once at Sissinghurst, this became a unifying theme. As she noted in In Your Garden, for January 1950:

‘It is amusing to make one-colour gardens. They need not necessarily be large, and they need not necessarily be enclosed, though the enclosure of a dark hedge is, of course, ideal. Failing this, any secluded corner will do, or even a strip of border running under a wall, perhaps the wall of the house. The site chosen must depend upon the general lay-out, the size of the garden, and the opportunities offered. And if you think that one colour would be monotonous, you can have a two- or even a three-colour, provided the colours are happily married, which is sometimes easier of achievement in the vegetable than in the human world. You can have, for instance, the blues and the purples, or the yellows and the bronzes, with their attendant mauves and orange, respectively. Personal taste alone will dictate what you choose.’

The idea for the Purple Border came first, all the flowers in a range around Vita’s favourite colour: ‘I must allow myself a purple patch. It isn’t purple at all: it is blue. Blue as the Mediterranean on a calm day; blue as the smoke rising in autumn bonfires from our autumnal woods; blue seen through the young green of chestnut or beech; blue as the star-cabochon sapphire given to a bride on her wedding-day; hyacinth-scented beyond all these, just a bluebell wood, an ordinary thing, a thing we take for granted.’

Once the wall on the north side of the Top Courtyard was complete in 1933, Vita was able to start planting and create a long border full of blue, purple and crimson. It was such a success – and still is – that Tony Lord wrote a chapter in his book Best Borders about this bed. Especially towards the end of the summer, it gives you a typical Sissinghurst blast of rich and effusive colour, not crazily gaudy but carefully held inside the boundaries of Vita’s treasured purple.

The Cottage Garden came next in1934/5, with a difficult range of colours – oranges, yellows, scarlets and deep reds which many gardeners steer well clear of, but here they were combined in a brave and sophisticated way. Harold influenced the making of this garden and there was always debate about whose initial idea it was for the sunset range of colour. He claimed it, but so did Vita. He had seen a garden in Mexico full of all the brilliant hues – magenta, scarlet, yellow and orange – thick with tropical creepers, morning glory, jacaranda and hibiscus.

Whether inspired by Harold or Vita, together they created a garden within the strict enclosure of the yew and holly hedge of the Cottage Garden: ‘a symphony of all the wild sunset colours, a sort of western sky after a stormy day,’ as Vita described it in 1952. ‘The sunset colours are not always very good mixers in a garden, happily though they may consort in the heavens. In a garden they should, I think, be kept apart from the pinks, and be given, if possible, a place to themselves. I know that few gardens nowadays can afford this extravagance of separate space, but I can still imagine a hedged-off enclosure where nothing but the glow of blood-orange-and-yellow roses should have its own way.’

She added four years later: ‘In a small square garden enclosed by holly hedges, I have been making notes of some plants in flower just now. They are all in the same range of colour – yellow, red, and orange – which explains why people often call it the sunset garden. At its best, it glows and flames. The dark hedges enhance the effect. Ideally, the hedges ought to be draped in ropes and curtains of the scarlet Tropaeolum speciosum, the Flame Flower so rampant in the North; but this must be a Scottish Nationalist by conviction, for it will have little to say to Sassenach persuasions.’

Harold’s study overlooked this garden, and he wrote several times about how much pleasure it gave him. In a letter to Vita in August 1940: ‘The Cottage Garden is ablaze with yellow and orange and red. A real triumph of gardening.’ He sat out there almost every day when he was at Sissinghurst, far away from work in London. He had a chair on the doorstep, in which he used to sit in the summer early afternoon and have a sleep.

Finally and most famously came the White Garden. This had started out life as Vita’s first rose garden, housing her ever expanding collection of old shrub roses. It was always an important garden, en route from the Priest’s House – where they ate – to both their workrooms and the South Cottage. As Vita discovered more and more beautiful Gallica, Moss and Bourbon roses, she decided to move the whole lot into the garden on the southern edge of the site, which was until 1937 devoted to growing vegetables, fruit and herbs.

It was then that her gradually evolving idea of having a white garden – or more accurately a grey, green and white garden – came to fruition, a development and a tightening of her monochrome colour theme.

The arch from the Rose Garden to the Tower Lawn, box hedges enclosing eremurus, which Vita loved. This is the place she first tried out her White Garden idea, but it was too shady and damp and she wanted more space.

She first had the idea during the war. In December 1939, the Lion Pond was drained – it had always leaked – and Vita thought of planting in that small corner of the Lower Courtyard ‘all white flowers, with some clumps of very pale pink. White clematis, white lavender, white agapanthus, white double primroses, white anemones, white camellias, white lilies including giganteum in one corner, and the pale peach-coloured Primula pulverulenta.’ They realised quickly it could not work, because that corner had too much shade, and many of the white plants she wanted to include were sun-lovers. The idea of a whole garden devoted to this range of colours then took shape:

‘I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden. This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it. One’s best ideas seldom play up in practice to one’s expectations, especially in gardening, where everything looks so well on paper and in the catalogues, but fails so lamentably in fulfilment after you have tucked your plants into the soil. Still, one hopes.

‘My grey, green, and white garden will have the advantage of a high yew hedge behind it, a wall along one side, a strip of box edging along another side, and a path of old brick along the fourth side. It is, in fact, nothing more than a fairly large bed, which has now been divided into halves by a short path of grey flagstones terminating in a rough wooden seat. When you sit on this seat, you will be turning your back to the yew hedge, and from there I hope you will survey a low sea of grey clumps of foliage, pierced here and there with tall white flowers. I visualize the white trumpets of dozens of Regale lilies, grown three years ago from seed, coming up through the grey of southernwood and artemisia and cotton-lavender, with grey-and-white edging plants such as Dianthus Mrs. Sinkins and the silvery mats of Stachys Lanata, more familiar and so much nicer under its English names of Rabbits’ Ears or Saviour’s Flannel. There will be white pansies, and white peonies, and white irises with their grey leaves … at least, I hope there will be all these things. I don’t want to boast in advance about my grey, green, and white garden. It may be a terrible failure. I wanted only to suggest that such experiments are worth trying, and that you can adapt them to your own taste and your own opportunities.

‘All the same, I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn-owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight – the pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow.’

These themes of so effectively concentrating the colour palette not just once, but three times, in one garden is masterly, confident, strong – a sign of her masculine dimension, an ability to impose her view on the world and key to the beauty of the Sissinghurst garden.