FROM OCTOBER 2005 ONWARDS, I slowly tried out the ideas I had for Sissinghurst. I started to think of them more publicly, not as desires but as facts, at least in embryo. Following my nose, asking my friends for hints and tips, I began to engage with the realities. I have nearly always worked alone and have loved that, the silence and privacy of it, the space which solitary work allows for ideas to accumulate and thicken like crystals dangling in a solution. On your own, understanding comes not by argument but accretion. It’s quick. There is no need for persuasion or repetition on your own. I always knew this was going to be different: the meetings, the hierarchies, feeling my way past embedded difficulties, seeing my own ideas from other people’s point of view. All of that was the price of getting something to happen for real, of pushing it beyond the limits of longing or regret, beyond the written. Real ambitions would mean real engagement. I knew from the start that any scheme here had to be commercially viable. This couldn’t be a fantasy park. Any exercise in vanity farming, in aesthetics or window-dressing, would mean nothing and anyway would smell wrong. The fertility of the ground, if it meant anything at all, could not be subsidised. In modern terms, it had to survive in the market, providing something that people were actually prepared to buy. I felt sure they would; if we got it right, people would want to buy little else. But we needed, first, a feasibility study. It would cost, I discovered, between £15,000 and £20,000.
Jonathan Light, Sally Bushell, the property manager at Sissinghurst, Sarah and I had a meeting in our kitchen, the first of hundreds: Sally gentle, warm, organisational, consensus-conscious, increasingly investing in a hope and belief that this idea might work, always friendly to us; Jonathan a precisionist with a razored haircut and the straightest of backs, who in an earlier life was a chartered engineer with ICI, now married to a barrister, always working out his requirements beforehand, distinguishing between desires and needs, a careful, note-taking, systematic man, economical in what he said but with a sharp line in the sardonic remark, the embodiment of consistency and courtesy, precisely the calming and sustaining presence Sissinghurst needed; and Sarah and I both slightly anxious in meetings, not quite having the meeting language and so tending to look amateur and impetuous, the ‘flaky creatives’, as Sarah called us one day. But we four were calmly getting to know each other, daring a joke now and then, gathering a trust in each other’s capabilities and good intentions. At the beginning, Jonathan asked whether I could get together an Outline Proposal for a Draft Project Brief for an Investigation of the Business Case to go out to Tender for a Consultative Exercise on the Ideas I had? Those were not quite his words but I said I could and it took a morning.
The ideal was of a kind of mixed farming that was traditional in the Weald until the 1960s, when the combination of an increasingly globalised market and the arrival of artificial fertilisers made it unviable. That kind of mixed farm was the frame in which the garden at Sissinghurst was originally set. The study needed to examine how far it was possible to reinvigorate the farming methods at Sissinghurst, with a view not to distant markets but to the value that its own restaurant and farm shop could create. The massive retail potential at Sissinghurst made the old landscape possible. The full polycultural variety should be the goal: soft fruit and top fruit, hops, dairy cattle, as well as cereals, beef cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, pigeons and ducks.
There were a thousand questions. How would Sissinghurst sell the products of its landscape to its visitors? Could the farm really provide the restaurant with everything it offered its customers? What would the economics be of a farm shop at Sissinghurst? Could the restaurant and shop, at the beginning of the year, ‘order’ their requirements from the farm? Could Sissinghurst make its own ice cream, bread, cakes, scones and jams from the dairy cows, fruit fields, wheats and ryes grown in the fields? Could the woods produce pea sticks, hurdles, chestnut fencing and furniture to be bought by customers? Could people take hop bines away with them in their cars? Was pick-your-own a possibility, perhaps of flowers as well as fruit? Could a chicken-run provide the eggs for the omelettes the restaurant would make? Was there a place for a bakery with a takeaway counter? Bringing animals back to the farm, the repatriation of farm management to Sissinghurst, the growing of vegetables and the setting up of a farm shop would all need buildings and equipment. Where should they go? And how would they fit with the tourist business?
Alongside that was the question of a business structure. Were the profit margins to be set in advance? Or could the Trust tolerate a lower level of profit here in return for the landscape benefits? Was it necessary to stick with the idea of farmer as producer and restaurant as client? Or should a single enterprise become the tenant of the farm, the restaurant and the farm shop? How integrated, in other words, could the retail and production arms at Sissinghurst be? Could a loss on one be set against the profits on the other?
Driving blind – and not knowing the true situation – I guessed that the Trust would have little money to bring all this about. But I also knew that it had raised £360,000 in two years at Sheffield Park in Sussex from visitor contributions – with the same number of visitors per year as Sissinghurst. That money was for replanting trees which had been blown down in the great storm of 1987 rather than this more nebulous and commercial scheme, but still it was no more than one pound a visitor. Would the Sissinghurst visitors want to pay for the set-up costs of this?
There was also a question of land. The farmed area at Sissinghurst looked as if it might be too small at 259 acres. More land was probably needed, either rented or acquired. I knew, of course, of the neighbouring Bettenham and Brissenden farms, which once belonged to my grandmother and which now belonged to a ninety-two-year-old law professor, Professor James, who lived at Benenden. I rang him one evening. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘Nigel’s son? You know he sold me those farms?’ I did. ‘A terrible price, terrible, really terrible.’ For you? I asked. ‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘For him.’ My poor father had sold those farms, now worth £3.5 million, for £15,000 in 1964. ‘To do up his house, wasn’t it?’ Professor James asked. I didn’t go into the details but instead risked my question. ‘Do you think there is any chance, Professor, that when you die you might consider leaving those farms, or some of them anyway, to the National Trust, to reunite the estate as it was before the 1960s? We have great plans for the farm here.’ A pause on the other end of the phone. ‘If there is one organisation in England to which I would not leave my property, it is the National Trust.’ He had been appalled, a few years earlier, when the Trust, which had accepted land on Exmoor on the condition, among others, that stag hunting would continue across it, had agreed under pressure from its own largely urban and anti-hunting membership to ban the hunt from its land. This was a question of honour, Professor James said, allied to one of uncertainty. How could he be sure that any agreement he made about these farms would be observed after he was dead? I said we would all do our best to see that agreements were honoured and how we had nothing but the best interests of the land in mind. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, swatting away a puppy. ‘Anyway, Robert Lewis, who has farmed it for many years for us, he’s the man for that land.’ So Bettenham and Brissenden were severed from Sissinghurst, perhaps for ever. We would have to live within our limits.
Sally, Jonathan, Sarah and I worked our way through the suggestions. I added a need for aesthetics. ‘Whatever is done must both look and feel right for Sissinghurst, and enhance rather than detract from what is already here. Aesthetics cannot be a last-priority bolt-on.’ Jonathan added the need for ‘reversibility’. If it went wrong, nothing we had done should be undoable. The scheme ‘must not land a white elephant on either the NT’s or Sissinghurst’s back’. And any scheme must be ‘revenue-neutral’. Sissinghurst as a whole must earn as much after any changes we made as before.
Having looked at the leases of the four farming tenants, Jonathan also found some good news. There was a break clause in all of them which meant that if we had a coherent plan together by September 2006, the Trust could give them a year’s notice to quit, which meant that by 26 September 2007, the land at Sissinghurst could be back in hand and the project could begin to work. The Trust had recently had some disastrous publicity when they had amalgamated two farm tenancies in the Lake District, and so they would have to tread with immense care around this issue. But this gave us a deadline and a timetable.
Fiona Reynolds had asked me to talk to the National Trust AGM that November in Brighton. ‘Don’t frighten the horses,’ Jonathan said, and so I spoke to them after dinner in big generalities. What was the National Trust for? It came down, I told them, to a new understanding of what was meant by the word ‘place’. That word is enshrined in the name of the Trust; it is a National Trust for Places. And what is a place? Not just a location.
The Trust does not own ‘sites’ in the way Asda or BP does. It doesn’t plonk down its identity on a neutral spot. Nor is a place an idea or an image. It is intensely concrete, the opposite of anything virtual, something that is thick with its own reality. And, more than that, a place is somewhere with a quality you might call ‘inner connectedness’. That is a subtle but powerful thing, which is related to a kind of self-sufficiency, a feeling in a place that its life is not borrowed or imposed from elsewhere, but is coming up out of its own soil.
The old debate, I told them, had always set commercialism and enterprise against poetry and conservation. But that was missing the point. People had a growing hunger for authenticity and the enriched place. The enormous proliferation in the modern world of slickly and thinly communicated meanings had generated a demand for the opposite, for the sense when you arrived somewhere that not only did this look wonderful but was wonderful, that it wasn’t just a skin. Gertrude Stein had famously said of Oakland, California, that ‘There is no there there’. For the Trust, and for all of us, thereness and turnover could be the same thing. All the NT had to do was make sure it was constantly cultivating and rejuvenating the thereness of the places it owned and its customers would flock in.
I did not feel in private quite as sanguine. I had underestimated the way in which these ideas would ruffle feathers at Sissinghurst. Anxiety was already raising its head. What people loved here was its ‘tranquillity’, and people were worried that my ideas would disturb it. Trucks, intensification, multiple demands: none of those felt very Sissinghursty. Nobody much liked the idea of chickens or pigs because of the smell. Already, just creaking open like a board splitting in the sunlight, the cracks were appearing between those who had the easy ideas and those who were expected to make them work.
In December, one freezing foggy Sunday, Sarah and I went to see Jacob Rothschild. The Rothschild house at Waddesdon belongs to the National Trust but the Rothschilds, because they are able to subsidise it to the tune of £1 million a year from a family trust, are able to decide pretty well everything that happens there. The garden writer and designer Mary Keen, who is a friend of the Rothschilds, had asked him to ask us to lunch. I wore a suit, which was a mistake as everyone else was in shirts and jerseys. A butler told us to park our dirty Land Rover next to a Swiss-number-plated Range Rover. Lady Rothschild gave us champagne. ‘Or would you prefer something else?’ A classical pavilion of a house. Guardis on the wall. Lunch in a French rococo room. I felt like a suited prune amid such riches, but Lady Rothschild was warmth itself. ‘Barbara Amiel said that Jacob marrying me was about as likely as the King of the Jews marrying a Hottentot,’ she whispered at lunch.
Rothschild was a king, huge in his red jersey, loping, looking at the world from a great height but full of grace. Just audible beneath the surface a great deal of idling, ticking-over horsepower in reserve, but generous in his eyes, exuding interest. Sarah grows a bulb called Gloriosa superba Rothschildiana. I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. After lunch we talked about the Sissinghurst scheme. He thought the Sissinghurst Trust idea bad because it set up two power bases and an inbuilt tension. ‘Why not take the whole thing over, including the garden?’
Impossible, I said.
‘Why?’
For a million and one reasons. The great difference was that the Rothschilds had their huge fund hosing money into Waddesdon and the National Trust was happy to accept anything they were prepared to pour down its throat. We were not in that position. But he was also discouraging about the prospect of raising any money. ‘It is much, much more difficult than you imagine.’ There was a kind of shy directness to him, and he was funny. ‘I couldn’t sack a day-lily,’ he said. But even talking to him about how to manage the relationship with the Trust was absurd. The idea that we could borrow any principles from Waddesdon was beyond a joke. In the car on the way home, Sarah said she didn’t want to take on the burden of it all. ‘Haven’t we had enough burdens for the past few years? Haven’t we got other things to do? What I want now is a rather unburdened existence. What exactly is the point of doing this now?’
So what was the point of doing it? That maybe we had some ideas of what might be good for Sissinghurst. That it was a place, which as a whole needed turning on to a better and richer course. That its current condition, as a whole, was a thin and singular version of what it might be – no one with any sense of a living reality could say it was a garden in a farm nowadays, which is what people imagined it was. That I felt a kind of bond with Sissinghurst which would not allow me to leave it like this. That I had in my mind a half-remembered, half-imagined state which, when set against the present, pained me. And, if I were honest with myself, I wanted to make my mark there. I did not simply want to be the receiving son. But I promised Sarah that if it did not work I would not continue to beat my head against this wall for ever. We would leave and do what we imagined was good elsewhere. We had long nurtured the idea of making a wild garden by a spring in the Amari valley in Crete, below Mount Ida, among the olives and the rocks. I promised her then that we wouldn’t die without that dream becoming true.
At home at Sissinghurst a couple of days later we gave a drinks party for everyone living and working there. Sofas pushed back, hot mulled wine, a big fire. Some time into the party, a woman, flushed with the warmth, came up to me. ‘You really think you’re the lord of the manor now, don’t you? Well, Adam, I can tell you something: you are not.’ So here it was: the sunny visions of perfection exposed to a cold and withering wind. There were people at Sissinghurst who considered it theirs, who had devoted their lives to it, who loved it quite as much as I did, and who felt that Sarah and I were more interested in our own welfare than in Sissinghurst’s. ‘Are we helping you do what you want,’ someone asked me, ‘or are you helping us do what we want?’ I thought even then that perhaps we should simply leave them to it and that they could make it in their own image.
We had a final meeting just before Christmas with Sue Saville. She said the Trust was happy to put some money into a feasibility study. A feasibility study! Have three words ever sounded quite so sweet? And how will it be paid for? I asked. ‘Sissinghurst will pay for it,’ Jonathan said. How, though? ‘The clause your father inserted in the 1967 agreement has meant that Sissinghurst is what we call a Special Trust in Credit. It has a large reserve accumulated against a rainy day.’ The disciplines exercised over the last fifteen years or so have meant that the size of the Sissinghurst financial cushion is astonishing. While the world has been borrowing, Sissinghurst has been saving, and the accumulated reserve now allows substantial annual expenditure with no diminution of the invested capital. People rarely applaud the National Trust for its financial management but this policy has been exemplary. Not a single aspect of the scheme this book describes would have been possible without it. As Jonathan said that afternoon, the farm project could not be allowed to lose money on its current account in the long term, but, within reason, it was not going to be constrained by shortage of capital.
Together, Jonathan, Sally, Sarah and I worked our way through the early part of the year. I made a list of target qualities for any scheme:
Authenticity
Richness
Rootedness
Connectedness
Vitality
Delight
Jonathan and Sally drew up a huge and careful tender document. Consultants came and made their bids for the work. We walked them around the place in the late winter, some in the rain, some on wonderful mornings when there was a frost on the moat, just a skin, not enough for a moorhen to walk on. The first spikes of the narcissus were up in the orchard and the aconites were out under the hedge between Delos and the White Garden, casually there like beautiful weeds. Against the light blue of the March mornings the consultants had ideas and questions. The old dairy and the barn next to it might be the farm shop and café. The Horse Race hedges would have to grow up if the fruit trees were to go back. Could the farm be enlarged? Could the restaurant expand into the barn? Did it have to be organic? There was a sense above all of potential in the air. Some of them were a bit highfalutin. ‘I don’t see why, when we know we’ve got our feet in the treacle,’ Jonathan said after reading one report, ‘we need to have our heads in it too.’ Helen Browning from the Soil Association took a bit of the soil away in a napkin I gave her. It felt like a kind of spring, tentative, only half there but, still, half there.
I went for walks in the early woods. The colours were changing, the purple of the alder catkins now mixed with the hazel and then the goat willows coming on like lights, the ‘palm trees’, as my nanny Shirley Punnett always used to call them. The geese were clanging away across the farm, their voices a long, deep echoing you could hear a mile downwind. Sissinghurst was full of one of the miracles of spring: the light suddenly penetrating to the floor of the wood, for the first time since the previous year, reaching into its depths as if into an aquarium or an unfinished house.
It was a heady time for me. I had become used to the idea that changes would happen at Sissinghurst without my knowing about them in advance. My father as he got older had increasingly accepted the decisions being made around him. I remember finding him once almost in tears, sitting at the kitchen table, having come back from a walk down by the lake, where he had seen that the wood he had loved all his life, fringing the lake and the stream that runs beside it, had been cut down without anyone telling him. He did not like an argument and had said nothing. That silent acceptance of unannounced change had seemed like the prevailing reality. And so now, as I felt the National Trust responding to these ideas I had, seeing them under Jonathan’s hands taking on a substance and a form, the experience was strange and unreal, almost vertigo-inducing. I realised I had never wielded influence before.
To my relief, the Soil Association, the champion of the organic idea, was awarded the contract, and their glamorous team turned up: Helen Browning, powerful, strong minded, clear voiced, a big farmer in Wiltshire, chair of a government committee on animal welfare, a partner in her own organic food business; alongside her, Katrin Hochberg, a cool, taut, courteous German in her twenties, with high cheekbones and eyes the colour of the North Sea in February. Both of them glowed with the kind of health that was a billboard for the organic idea. And Phil Stocker, a Bristol man, once a big-time chemical farmer who went to work for the RSPB, saw the organic light and now devotes every hour of his life to persuading the farmers of England to go the way he has gone. Every sentence he speaks delivers straight, persuasive idealism. When these three arrived, I felt as if I had bought a new car. With them we could go anywhere. No weariness and no viscosity, nor any sense that they were in service to some antiquated or inherited idea. They looked like ushers to the future.
We walked around the farm on a sunny day in April. Spring was coming on and the blackthorn was out in the hedges. An occasional wild cherry was a white flash in the wood. The higher trees had not yet leafed up but in the garden the magnolia petals were lying browned and scattered among the lungwort at their feet like the scales of a fish. There was colour in the world. The pigeons were sitting in the trees like fattened Christmas decorations. From out in the arable fields, where the soil was still as bare and brown as it had been at the end of August, the daffodils, the forsythia and the cherry blossom in the orchard blazed away. You could smell the soil drying in the sun as if it were some kind of vegetable mass.
With Helen and then again with Phil I walked across the empty arable fields. Nothing was growing in them. Nothing had been planted and the weeds had been sprayed off. Everywhere around us, the celandines were emerging in the hedge banks and the garlic along the stream, the anemones and the first of the bluebells were out in the wood. The cuckoo was cuckooing, there were yellowhammers and blackcaps, and some larks were singing high above us, embroidering their song on the glowing air, but the earth beneath our feet was lifeless, a dusty and degraded place. Phil had a spade with him, and in one arable field after another he dug into the surface. Everywhere, in Frogmead and in Lodge and Large, even in Banky on the far side of the Hammer Brook, the spade went in an inch or two and stopped. That top couple of inches was loose and friable but below it the earth had compacted into solid and impenetrable clay. There were some wormcasts here and there on the surface, but when Phil dug deeper and revealed a section in the side of the small square hole, he showed me how nothing living was penetrating deeper than the surface inches. Here were the results of decade after decade of extractive agriculture. Some farmyard manure was still spread on these fields, and they were occasionally broken up with a subsoiling plough, but in essence they had been squeezed and compacted to within an inch or two of their lives. The Soil Association is called that for a reason: the basis of organic farming is attending to the well-being of the soil. It is the matrix in which life – bacterial, vegetable and animal – has its beginnings. Here the matrix was little better than a polystyrene block, the sterilised background into which artificial fertilisers could be injected and high-intensity grains grown. That pale, lifeless soil was a picture of everything that had gone wrong. You only had to look at it to see that an organic system here, one that rested the land from time to time in fertility-building leys, which restored organic matter to these lifeless soils, was the only way this scheme could go. Organic was the obvious and default option.
Only in one place did Phil’s face light up. Just outside the restaurant, in the Cow Field, where the dairy herd had always been turned out after milking, I dug Phil’s spade in. If you had been watching it in slow motion, you would have seen, with my first plunge, its worn and shiny leading edge slicing down into the green of the spring grass, slowly burying the full body of the blade in the earth and travelling on beyond it so that the spade came to rest with the ground level an inch up the shaft. Nothing wrong with that. I sliced out a square of turf and lifted it over. A delicious tweedy-brown crumbling soil appeared, a Bolognese sauce of a soil, rich and deep, smelling of life. Inside the small square trench, juicy beefsteak worms writhed in the sunlight. Here was James Stearns’s ‘best bit of dirt on the farm’, the stuff in which he had said we could grow anything we liked. ‘It’s got to be the veg patch, hasn’t it?’ Phil said. Smiles all over his face. Peter Dear, the NT warden, came with his dog, and the three of us lay down on the grass there, looking across the Low Weald to the north-east, chatting about the birds, and how they loved the game crop in Lower Tassells. There were two larks making and remaking their song high over Large Field below us. How could we ensure the new farm was as friendly to birds as that? It was a moment when I felt I could see something of the future, that slow, exploratory, otter-like feeling, which you recognise only as it rises to the surface inside you, that an idea might be one worth having.
It was clear from the beginning that the consultants’ task was more than to provide a set of plans and figures. Anything new had to fit with the old. Helen said to me almost as soon as she arrived that none of it would work unless both Sissinghurst and the Trust subscribed to it. So we were to have meetings, partly to hear what Sissinghurst thought of the ideas and partly to tell Sissinghurst what the ideas were.
Late in April 2006, we all gathered in the lower part of the restaurant, the whole Sissinghurst community, which almost never gathered in one place. The anxiety was palpable in the room. I was nervous and I knew both Jonathan Light and Helen Browning were too. Helen had brought with her some facilitators, two glowingly beautiful, clear-eyed young women in plum and lime-green cardigans from the Soil Association. I told Helen afterwards how marvellous they were. ‘I’ve got shedloads of those,’ she said.
We split into groups and discussed what meant most to us about Sissinghurst. Jo Jones, one of the gardeners, summed the best of Sissinghurst up as ‘established slowly over time; vulnerability; fragility; tenderness’. Claire Abery, another gardener, said she always liked seeing the visitors come but never minded seeing them go. People loved the sense that the place was full of its stories, that Sissinghurst somehow had an emotional existence beyond its bricks and lawns.
Then we came up with some ideas for the future. Several people said ‘Do nothing’ and ‘Make no Change’. The anxiety had its origins, I think, in a fear that any changes could only be for the bad. For many years the people working at Sissinghurst had defended it against what they had seen as excessive commercialisation from NT Enterprises, the Trust’s business arm, and thought of themselves as the guardians of Sissinghurst’s soul. On top of that, the years of reduced spending had meant that the gardeners’ eating and washing facilities had not been updated since the 1960s and were frankly disgraceful. The restaurant building had not been improved since the early 1990s. The offices and workshops were far below the standards expected in everyday commercial life. Many people working at Sissinghurst had been clamouring for these improvements for years and nothing had been done. Now here, apparently, as soon as Adam turns up, there was money à gogo for consultants, plans, changes. Why was that? And was it fair?
The head gardener, Alexis Datta, apologised to me later for the ‘negativity’ she had shown to these ideas over the months. Only slowly, I think, did we come to realise that we weren’t as far apart as we thought. What I was suggesting had its roots deep in the historical soil of Sissinghurst, but no one here had ever seen any of it. They did not know what was missing. What I thought of as old and better they saw as new and suspect. Nor did they see any lack in the farm. ‘What could be better than that?’ Alexis asked me one day when pointing across the grass of the Cow Field and the big arable fields beyond it. ‘I want it to be kept like that,’ she said. We were told, as a kind of joke, that the way in which we were living here, with our rabbits and our bikes up against the hedges, was ‘like having white trash move in’. It is not particularly easy to be told that, but I recognised well enough that we represented disruption, unneatness, a departure from the way it had been for the last ten or fifteen years.
I had not understood one crucial point. Everything I was suggesting drew its inspiration from what I had known and seen forty or forty-five years ago. My plans seemed to me like a regrounding of Sissinghurst, a return to the condition – or a version of it – in which it had existed for centuries. To almost everyone else, though – if not my sisters and not the Beales, Stearnses or Cliffords – it felt like a major disruption of something that, in their experience, up to seventeen years in one case, had ‘always’ been as it now was. My return to source was for them a destruction of perfection.
There was some recent history to this. Largely under my father’s stimulus, and his unrelenting publicity campaign, visitor numbers had peaked at 197,000 in 1991. The whole place and everyone working in it were stretched beyond any sense of ease or comfort. It was felt that the ‘spirit of the place’ was being damaged by its tourist business and a new strategy was set up: stop all publicity, reduce visitor numbers, introduce timed tickets to the garden and cut expenditure so that Sissinghurst could begin to accumulate a financial reserve. The income from that reserve would mean in future that Sissinghurst no longer needed to rely on a huge visitor flow. By 1992 visitor numbers had dropped to 151,000, and went down to 135,000 in 2001. Meanwhile, the strategic reserve was steadily growing. The threat of crass commercialisation had been averted and the ideal of stillness and quiet, a steady state, had come to replace it.
What I was saying seemed to be overturning that, and it would continue to be difficult for months. At times it became personal. When I sat down opposite one of the gardeners at one meeting, she said, ‘Oh God, do we really have to have you here?’
My head told me that it was a question of washing away the fears. And that there was also a perfectly hard set of constraints: Sissinghurst did not need any more visitors; nor too much of a drain on its running costs. Any plans had to be careful about not damaging what was already here. But in the face of all this it was difficult to maintain buoyancy and conviction. People higher up the Trust were prepared to countenance our plans; at Sissinghurst I felt increasingly besieged. I cherished tiny breakthroughs. Early one morning, Claire Abery told me that she had been given Sarah’s book about growing vegetables, she was loving it and was planting up raised beds in her garden. ‘Most of the time people don’t join up the aesthetics with growing the veg but Sarah has done it,’ she said. I said Sarah was keen to help in growing the vegetables here. ‘Do you think I could do it with her?’ Claire said. I could have kissed her.
At the end of April 2006, I asked Simon Fraser, a good and wise friend of mine, what we should do. He was sanity itself. I should put my ideas and energy into setting things up now in the way I thought they ought to be. Be patient. It takes time for ideas to become clear. Make sure the farm was combined with the farm shop and restaurant so that they were mutually supportive, not in some kind of market competition with each other. Don’t get financially, managerially or practically involved, as that would end in grief and upset. Sarah and I should remain as members of the Sissinghurst Farm Board, to trim the direction it would take in the future. Eliminate risk, have no areas of conflict, give Sissinghurst what you can and then leave the National Trust to it. That was all we could do. It belonged to them and they would have to manage it. We shouldn’t ever put ourselves in a position where we were claiming more than they could possibly give. Gauge that gap. Go where there is a door to be opened. Don’t think of demolishing walls.
I realised, as Simon spoke, that this was an exercise in adulthood, in understanding the nature of organisations, and perhaps of places. It was unlike writing, where all you had to do was get the sentences and paragraphs in a clarifying and pleasing order. This was about having an idea, getting it in order, and only then creating a culture – in the sense of a laboratory culture, a growing environment – in which the ideas could take root and flourish. It was going to be slow and would never follow a straight line. And it needed the other side to speak. Nothing would happen unless everyone involved in the life of Sissinghurst made their claims on these ideas. It wasn’t a question of recovering Sissinghurst but the opposite: allowing it a life, giving it what we could, gradually easing the concerns of people who worked here, understanding that we had to adapt our ideas to the sense of tranquillity that they cherished. The coexistence of vitality and tranquillity: that was the ideal, a kind of balanced health. And then confessing to ourselves that Sissinghurst had a life that stretched far beyond us.
I could feel myself being educated by this process. My previous experience of organisations had been either at the top or at the bottom. As a journalist, I merely did my best to provide what the paper wanted. A reporter is only a tool in the proprietor’s hands; he certainly does not run the machine. And when I had run the small publishing company with my cousin Robert Sackville West or helped my wife Sarah run her Garden and Cookery School, we had made the simple decisions ourselves, with small staffs and with clear, single purposes to fulfil. Sissinghurst could not have been more different: viscous, anxious, convoluted, not entirely articulate about its needs, slow to respond, occasionally crabby. At other times warm, friendly, receptive, nurturing and generous. It was, in other words, rather old in the way it did things and that oldness and embeddedness, its maturity, had to be understood. New oldness: that was the goal.