Sissinghurst and Vita’s roses

Their destination was an old Tudor farmstead in Kent called Sissinghurst. It included a tower – the remains of what had once been a fine Elizabethan house – and a series of derelict buildings. The garden seemed to have more rubbish in it than plants. Old sardine tins, ploughshares, rusty bedsteads and broken down earth closets littered the place.

Most ordinary people would have run away from it quickly. Everyone else who’d viewed it in the past two years had. But the 38-year-old Vita, was certainly not ordinary, as evidenced perhaps by her company. She and her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson, were both bi-sexual and they had an open, if often tumultuous, marriage.

See Troy’s video tour of Sissinghurst

Vita’s passion project

Vita had grown up in one of England’s finest Elizabethan houses, Knole. This was the Kent home of a long line of her aristocratic ancestors. It was a place she adored. She should have inherited it, but the huge house was entailed to the male line through her father’s title. She was ineligible to become ‘Baron Sackville’ and had to move out. On her father’s death in 1928, her uncle and his family took possession. The pain of this injustice ran deep.

Vita and Harold had created a new home at Long Barn in Kent with the help of the great architect Edwin Lutyens. But in 1930 a battery chicken farmer was buying the farm next door.  Sore from the loss of Knole and now finding her new home under threat, Vita needed an escape. She needed a new project on which to expend her passion. To the horror of her young son Nigel, derelict Sissinghurst fitted the bill perfectly. “I think we shall be happy in this place,” she said to him.

In fact, Sissinghurst had once belonged to one of her Sackville ancestors and so in a sense she was coming home. The Tudor brick walls (a perfect backdrop for old roses), the ancient orchards, the remains of a nuttery and the neglected kitchen garden called to her.

“The place, when I first saw it on a spring day… caught instantly at my heart and my imagination. I fell in love at first sight… It was Sleeping Beauty’s Garden: but a garden crying out for rescue.” – Vita Sackville-West

Harold joined her the next day and they quickly made an offer. Even before the contract was signed (for £12,375) she had planted her first rose – the white climber, ‘Mme Alfred Carrière’, on the south face of the South Cottage.

Troy Scot-Smith, head gardener at Sissinghurst today, says: “Vita was in despair at not inheriting her family home of Knole. When she came across Sissinghurst she realised that she could, I think, redeem her life and that loss by making something beautiful here – not by building with bricks and mortar, but by making a garden.”

Transformation

Over the next 30 years Vita and Harold transformed Sissinghurst – “bending some stubborn acres to my will,” as she put it. Harold did the structural planning; Vita the planting. She placed things where she thought they looked best, not where convention dictated. Herbs were not constrained to the herb patch. Nor roses to the rose garden. “I like muddling things up,” she once wrote. She also liked to pack her garden. ‘Cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny,’ she urged.

But Harold’s influence helped balance this. They made a great team, says Troy. “She was a poet, novelist, garden writer, and an amazingly romantic – a sort of wild character. In contrast, her husband was more of a classicist. He was a diplomat and a diarist. That combination meant that the garden has this very organised footprint.” Within this structure the plants would often border on the unruly. Vita loved climbing and rambling roses but pruned them only lightly – she liked the shaggy swathes and did not want to disturb the birds nests within them.

“I suppose one must take for granted this birds’-nest passion… I will have to resign myself to my home being an omelet most of the spring and a guano dump the rest of the time.”  – Harold complaining about Vita’s approach to pruning climbing roses

Sissinghurst was always an unconventional home. The kitchen and dining room were in the ‘Priest’s House’. This was also where her sons slept when home from boarding school. But the couple chose as their main living quarters the ‘South Cottage’. The library was in the gatehouse, which was also where the cook and housekeeper lived. Vita set up her writing desk in a study in the tower.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Vita and Harold’s design for the five-acre garden was essentially a series of rooms – 10 of them. They joined the brick living spaces together, acting as green corridors you passed through from one space to another.

Old roses

Vita’s particular passion was for old roses. She played a major part in their rescue and in making them popular again.

“What incomparable lavishness they give… There is nothing scrimpy or stingy about them. They have a generosity which is as desirable in plants as in people” – Vita Sackville-West on old roses

The archives show she had strong connections with others who shared her passion, like Maud Messel at Nymans, and Graham Stuart Thomas, who later created the National Trust’s collection of old roses at Mottisfont.

Troy says: “She loved plants with historical and literary associations. She loved faraway places and I think these roses with exotic sounding names must have appealed to her.”

Looking through the list of Vita’s roses it does seem like she chose them as much for their labels as their beauty. Names like ‘Duchesse d’Angoulême’, ‘Tuscany Superb’, ‘Baron de Wassenaer’, ‘Blanche Moreau’, ‘Sydonie’ and ‘Rosa Mundi’ are redolent with romance and mystery.

The ‘Mme Alfred Carrière’ rose on the South Cottage became particularly famous, helping to popularise this voracious climber that too many of us have tried to tame – unsuccessfully ­– on a six-foot fence! Her original plant died in 2019 but just before then the team had taken a cutting, which is now making its way back up the wall.

Sissinghurst was Vita’s great legacy – as great as her books (and if you haven’t read any of them, I recommend All passion spent as a starter). She died in 1962. Their son Nigel gave the house to the National Trust in 1967.

Sissinghurst today

There is a big difference between how Vita gardened and how Troy and his team garden today. And that is the sheer number of visitors it attracts – 200,000 a year. Troy, who first started work at Sissinghurst 30 years ago, says: “Vita gardened in this really quite special way. Each room would have a certain moment… the main rose garden… would peak in June, and then she would leave it. She didn’t care that it didn’t look much after that. And the cottage garden would look nice in July and August, the white garden perhaps in in May. For her, it was about that single moment. And she put it something like: ‘It’s like turning the lights off and on in a large country house when you move from room to room.’

“Whereas for us, we need to make each room look better for longer. It’s not really acceptable to have a five-acre garden with only one space looking good if a visitor comes in June. So we’ve added layers of planting to stretch the interest out. First we grow the plants we know Vita and Harold had, and then we supplement that with lots of plants that we think they might have chosen.”

Vita’s presence

Does he feel the ghost of Vita on his shoulder encouraging or admonishing him as he’s at work?

“No!” he laughs. “In Vita’s writing room her presence is strong. And I did sleep one night in Vita’s bed, in June in 2017. With the windows open in June and the garden sweeping up to my bed clothes, I felt her presence. That’s the only time. I don’t feel it when I’m gardening. We’re not method acting. What we try and do is understand the history, but then at the moment of gardening, we need to be creative and instinctive and be ourselves and expressive. But the garden suggests all those things as well. Vita, I think, said the garden dreamt us. So the garden is in control. We’re just its mere servants, really tweaking and prodding her.”