It is both irritating and encouraging to have a drawstring of showery days during the busiest season of the gardening year . Irritating because there is so much to do alfresco , and so little meter to get all the planting , weed , mulching and other job done . supporting because the rainfall is involve , and , frankly , so is the reprieve .
I like to weed in the rain , especially if it is just a fine mist , and I do n’t have somewhere to go that requires that my hair count like anything other than a Brillo pad . Weeds pop handily out of damp ground , and I savour the childlike feeling of playing in the mud . A academic session of weeding in the pelting is also a good way to still the guilt that I inescapably feel about sitting down with a good gardening book once the weed academic term is over .
This past week I have been sitting down withVita ’s Other Worldby Jane Brown ; a mass subtitle , “ A Gardening Biography of V. Sackville - West ” . Gardeners who are unfamiliar with Vita Sackville - West ( 1892 - 1962 ) can enrich their lives by acquire to know her . She was , first and first of all , an example of a sure kind of English woman who does not exist any longer . Born into a wealthy mob just before the turn of the nineteenth hundred , she maturate up at a great English estate called Knole in the county of Kent , beleaguer by blue-blooded and intellectual trappings and fabulous gardens . Eventually she married Harold Nicolson , a diplomat , scholar and writer . Vita and Harold were socially , intellectually and sometimes romantically link with members of the literary and artistic Bloomsbury group , including generator Virginia Woolf . Vita , a act writer for most of her life , was celebrated as a poet and critic of poetry . She also became famed as a nurseryman and a gardening columnist for theObservernewspaper . Compilations of her gardening essay , as well as many of her other literary works , are still in photographic print .
There are quite a few biography of the Nicolsons , include the fascinatingPortrait of aMarriage , by their son , Nigel . Vita ’s Other Worldis unique because it observe Vita the gardener , the famous garden that she made at her home at Long Barn and Sissinghurst , and the passion for gardening that she shared with Harold Nicolson .
take about Vita and her gardens is like entering into an English - accented ambition . The pace of sprightliness is slower , garden avail is easier to come by , and there is enough fourth dimension each mean solar day to emphasise spells of garden and write with tenacious walk in the English countryside . What ’s more , Vita had access to great gardeners of her day like Gertrude Jekyll , with her meticulously color - blended herbaceous delimitation . Vita entrance my sympathies because even as Harold pleaded poverty , Vita ( with his full reinforcement and understanding ) corrupt plants and added to the gardens .
Vita was , among other thing , a rosarian who loved honest-to-goodness varieties . Among the roses that covered her first household , Long Barn , was one of my favorites , the gorgeous dandy - yellow crampoon , ‘ Gloire de Dijon ’ . Vita also loved the Pemberton hybrid musks and the lush Bourbon rosebush . She had a similar soft spot for little flowers such as genus Viola , rockfoil ( sometimes know as rockfoil ) and gentians that could be found in pocket in Harlan Fisk Stone wall or put in in Harlan Fisk Stone “ sink ” or public treasury .
The Nicolsons ’ gardens were plush and quixotic , full of lilies , iris , paeony , genus Allium and pink . Though Vita never enrol the kitchen , her herb garden had every smorgasbord imaginable . She also had strong agrarian leanings , and her most famous garden , at Sissinghurst , supported figs , grape , alpine strawberry , apple , pear , peaches , nectarines and something the author telephone a “ cherry - plum tree ” or myrobalan . Though not assailable to the public during Vita ’s lifetime , there was also a robust vegetable garden on the estate .
The garden of Sissinghurst were chatter by yard of people during the Nicolsons ’ lifetimes , and tens of thousands since . Now , probably the most renowned part of that garden is Vita ’s “ White Garden ” , which was design in 1949 . It is full of lily-white - flowered cultivar , complimented by an regalia of silver gray - leafed plants , with the general whiteness raise here and there by touches of wan white-livered . The White Garden , which Jane Brown says was inspired by Vita ’s tendency to be a “ night hooter ” , has exhort countless impersonation in many part of the public .
Vita Sackville - West was an improper woman who had a successful , if unconventional kinship with her husband . The family relationship resulted in extraordinary gardens . When I intend about the Nicolsons , their life seem remote from this time and spot . After all , Vita never had to stop weeding so as to make dinner or bring up the calculator , and I am quite certain that Harold never took out the garbage . On the other hand , every literal nurseryman can empathize with the woman who wrote , “ … how I care I had another 50 old age to look forward to and 10 gardeners and 10 thousand pounds leave to me … to be expended on nothing but the garden . ”
by E. Ginsburg
