Monday, March 10, 2014

Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst review – a wealth of inspiration for gardeners

A triumphant return to Sissinghurst will inspire plenty to get pruning

vita sackville west
Vita Sackville-West photographed for the Observer in her garden at Sissinghurst by Jane Bown, 1960.

You might be forgiven for wondering whether we need another book on Sissinghurst. It is only five years since Adam Nicolson, grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, produced Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History. That beautifully written meditation was underscored by a crusading practical anxiety; a resolve to bypass the danger of the National Trust-owned estate (where he and his family still live) continuing as no more than an exhibit by giving it living purpose with a working organic farm and a restaurant and shop selling home-grown produce.
    This new book by his wife, the gardener and writer Sarah Raven, is a companion piece but not a sequel – and it is, unexpectedly, a joy. If his was a book involving edgy disquiet, hers is about beauty, enjoyment, celebration of making – everything that good gardening ought to be. Its atmosphere is as consoling as sun-warmed brick. It is fastidiously illustrated by beautiful photographs old and new. Raven believes, justifiably, that a dynamic past can instruct the present and her book is a bid to see that Vita's thinking is not stilled. About the progress of her husband's project, she is silent.

    This book leans on – and quotes extensively from – the Observer gardening columns that Vita produced, from her Elizabethan tower, between 1946 and 1961. She wrote with sympathetic ardour about plants and much breezy, witty, affectionate personification. It is sometimes as if she were composing character references, recommending plants for positions in her readers' gardens. "May I put in a good word for dill?" Or of old roses: "They load the air with the true rose scent… Have I pleaded in vain?" Of Jasminum polyanthum: "I hope I have said enough to stir temptation." Usually, she has.
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