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Posh but Down-to-Earth

Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the irritation I felt (since I am not annoyed by villa holidays per se) had to do with the too obvious double entendre. In fact, one does not forget the first time that one does quite a lot of things – seeing one’s name in print, for instance, or walking along Striding Edge, that most vertiginous of paths on to the top of Helvellyn – and certainly I have never forgotten the first time I read a gardening book.

I was only 20, and still at university, when I was given V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book by a friend, a first-rate gardener who was keen to encourage my burgeoning interest. I see from the flyleaf that she hoped I would be ‘as delighted and inspired by this book’ as she was. Yes, indeed. I had never read anything like it. Gardening advice then meant Percy Thrower and Arthur Billitt – extraordinary characters who looked in the 1970s as if they had landed in a time capsule from the Edwardian era – together with Roses: Their Culture and Management, a book which lived for many years in the downstairs loo, where it was definitely read more as a way of passing the time than for pleasure. To come across a writer, therefore, on such an unpromising subject, who spoke immediately and directly to the reader in an easy yet cultured style, was a revelation.

V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book, published by Michael Joseph, was an anthology compiled from four earlier books – In Your Garden (1951), In Your Garden Again (1953), More for Your Garden (1955) and Even More for Your Garden (1958). These were themselves anthologies of the best of her immensely popular weekly Observer articles, which had appeared since 1947 and were to continue until 1961, the year before she died. (When I began to write

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Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the irritation I felt (since I am not annoyed by villa holidays per se) had to do with the too obvious double entendre. In fact, one does not forget the first time that one does quite a lot of things – seeing one’s name in print, for instance, or walking along Striding Edge, that most vertiginous of paths on to the top of Helvellyn – and certainly I have never forgotten the first time I read a gardening book.

I was only 20, and still at university, when I was given V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book by a friend, a first-rate gardener who was keen to encourage my burgeoning interest. I see from the flyleaf that she hoped I would be ‘as delighted and inspired by this book’ as she was. Yes, indeed. I had never read anything like it. Gardening advice then meant Percy Thrower and Arthur Billitt – extraordinary characters who looked in the 1970s as if they had landed in a time capsule from the Edwardian era – together with Roses: Their Culture and Management, a book which lived for many years in the downstairs loo, where it was definitely read more as a way of passing the time than for pleasure. To come across a writer, therefore, on such an unpromising subject, who spoke immediately and directly to the reader in an easy yet cultured style, was a revelation. V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book, published by Michael Joseph, was an anthology compiled from four earlier books – In Your Garden (1951), In Your Garden Again (1953), More for Your Garden (1955) and Even More for Your Garden (1958). These were themselves anthologies of the best of her immensely popular weekly Observer articles, which had appeared since 1947 and were to continue until 1961, the year before she died. (When I began to write for the Observer in 1986, I found that there were still readers around who had principally taken the newspaper in order to read her gardening columns, and who rather wished she was still doing them. There was also a sub-editor working there who was rather glad she was not, since she had apparently hated changes being made to her copy.) These articles nearly all referred to her garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, which she and her husband, the diplomat-turned-writer Sir Harold Nicolson, had laid out from 1930. They covered her successes and failures, the plants she liked, the ideas she had; in short, the small bright coinage of gardening life, new-minted by a very good practical gardener and plantsman. Her articles gave the impression that she was a woman leading a quiet, orderly country life, spending her time filling in seed orders and going out to deadhead roses in the evening, when in fact her private life could still sometimes be tumultuous, if not on the scale it had been before the war. The book I was given in 1973 is long since out of print, but last spring Frances Lincoln reissued the two earliest, and best, collections, In Your Garden and In Your Garden Again. Both are essentially anthologies of the Observer articles, except that the first contains other writings as well, including an excellent extended essay on Hidcote Manor, reprinted from a 1949 issue of the RHS Journal. The books are facsimiles of the originals, which gives them a distinct and pleasantly period feel. I had not read either of these collections since the mid-1980s, so I picked them up with just that same sense of anticipation I get when picking up an Anne Tyler, say. I know what to expect and know it won’t disappoint. Take the entry for 18 June 1950, for example, when she first writes about her famous thyme lawn:
Two years ago, I had what I thought might be a bright idea. It has turned out so bright, in both senses of the word, that I must pass it on. I had two small windswept beds . . . divided by a path of paving stones down the middle. I tried every sort of thing in them, including a mad venture of hollyhocks, which, of course, got flattened by the prevailing south-west wind, however strongly we staked them. So then I decided I must have something very low growing, which would not suffer from the wind, and scrapped the hollyhocks, and dibbled in lots and lots of thyme, and now have a sort of lawn which, while it is densely flowering in purple and red, looks like a Persian carpet laid flat on the ground out of doors. The bees think that I have laid it for their especial benefit. It really is a lovely sight; I do not want to boast, but I cannot help being pleased with it; it is so seldom that one’s experiments in gardening are wholly successful.
Or how about this on the Algerian iris, Iris unguicularis?
You should search your clumps of the grass-like leaves every day for possible buds, and pull the promising bud while it still looks like a tiny, tightly-rolled umbrella, and then bring it indoors and watch it open under a lamp. If you have the patience to wait long enough, you will see this miracle happen.
Of course, these essays can be uneven – sometimes a little patronizing to her readers, and occasionally obviously dashed off. You can see that the Sunday morning task could sometimes be a chore, rather than a pleasure. But I think you can tell she often enjoyed connecting with fellow-gardeners, many of whom had no inkling that she was an aristocrat, living in the middle of an enormous, complex garden, who wrote her weekly articles halfway up a stately Tudor tower. She was a self-taught amateur, like them, but one who could lift her readers’ eyes towards horizons they might otherwise not have seen. She wrote in a light, accessible, excited and, at times, attractively diffident manner. She was sympathetic, honest and positive. She rarely dwelt on plants she did not like, except the rose ‘American Pillar’, which she could not stand. Who can? Best of all, although the canvas on which she worked was large, she painted pictures with small groups of plants, so that her ideas could be translated to much smaller gardens than her own. When I was 20, and had never read anything on gardening before, I was enchanted by Vita’s light-hearted seriousness and practical romanticism, and have uncritically championed her ever since, despite a gradual realization that she was not that original. She was influenced in particular by Gertrude Jekyll (the White Garden and all), and William Robinson, and I suspect Norah Lindsay and Lawrence Johnston as well. The structure of the garden at Sissinghurst – as she would freely admit – was Harold Nicolson’s triumph, not hers. That said, no gardening writer, before or since, has had more power to delight or inspire. And I rather doubt I would be a gardening journalist now, if I had not read Vita first of all.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Ursula Buchan 2005


About the contributor

Ursula Buchan writes on gardening for The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. Like Vita Sackville-West, her gardening journalism has been collected into anthologies – Good in a Bed and Better Against a Wall – but there she fears the similarity ends.

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