By Mattie O’Callaghan, Horticultural Trainee
Wafts of almost centuries old sweet roses fill the air, beds overflow with flowers; lilac velvet bearded irises shimmer in their dresses, purple lupins rise to the stage, peony buds unravel in the heat, and giant red poppies dance in the breeze. We are here transforming our gardeners feet into ballet shoes as we tiptoe across the performance. Stems are held gently, staked loosely to find their own support, small trowels dig the way for new plants home-grown by the nursery team, small snips deadhead, making way for new buds. This is the fine art of gardening, practiced as part of a growing return to the romanticism of Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson’s garden of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.
This garden is a garden of desires, planted for the pure joy and love Vita had for plants in all their glory. Known for her bisexual affairs, but also for her feelings of being the ‘middlesex’ or what we would now call non-binary, she cross-dressed as a wounded war soldier named Julian during her affair with Violet Trefusis and was the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The garden is an essential part of this queer performance and whether it is noticed by others or not, I take refuge and inspiration in my week of being entangled in Vita’s queer branches.
On my first morning I joined Assistant Head Gardener Saffron to document Vita’s Azalea bank, which she planted after receiving a sum of money from her poem The Garden in 1946. They were striking oranges, yellows, pinks and reds, blooming in a firework display across the moat walk. They were softened after Vita’s death and varieties were lost. Started by previous Sissinghurst Scholar Claire Margetts, Saffron is continuing to restore the bank and its rainbow explosion. Restoring Vita’s romantic legacy is central to the garden team’s work, led by Head Gardener Troy Scott-Smith. Throughout the week we filled borders with the bounty and diversity of all the plants she loved.
With queer histories untold, forgotten or erased in centuries of shame and censorship, Sissinghurst’s gardeners are restoring the work of a historic queer creative, of which we have few to look to. Vita’s work in her time felt censorship, her 1923 book Challenge centred on her love affair with Violet, but because of this so-called ‘scandal’ she felt pressure to withdraw it from publication. Although it was published in America in 1928, it wasn’t released in the UK until 1973. Through folding through once-censored pages in Vita’s writing room and immersing myself in the reintroduction of Vita’s plants, it became clear how remembering and retelling through gardening can become an act of queer care.
This has become no clearer than in the creation of Delos, designed by Dan Pearson, which brings alive Vita and Harold’s failed attempt to make a garden inspired by their 1935 visit to the Greek Island of Delos. Their project was never quite realised due to challenges of it being north-facing, on clay and surrounded by mature trees. Yet, inspired by their efforts, Dan and his studio have set to work to reimagine Delos inspired by the landscape of wildflowers and shrubs which are maintained by processes of grazing and fires.
Now giant fennel reaches up to kiss the blue sky, while euphorbias and poppies seed themselves generously across the site. It is a dreamlike transformation into another world, another room of Vita’s desires. Making alive not only a garden, but a landscape which is changing in response to hot flames and embraces the wildness of the self sown. As my own genderless body shifts and changes, I found comfort in becoming the fire, in becoming the grazer, and letting Vita’s dreams evolve in time.
Reseeding and safeguarding Vita’s legacy is central to the work of Sissinghurst’s Nursery team, who through careful propagation, provide all the plants in the garden and a few extras for visitors to take home. I spent a session with the team and Daisy, who was visiting this week from Pictorial Meadows, sowing seeds while the robins came in and danced about us on the potting table. The seeds are carefully harvested in the late summer garden before being sown the following spring as the ground is awakening. Inside the packet is a diversity and abundance awaiting its chance to bloom in its own unique way, just like Vita allowed plants and people to be their own expression of themselves.
Thirty-three miles away down in the Sussex countryside behind another garden wall lay the home of Vanessa Bell – the sister of Vita’s lover, Virginia Woolf – and Duncan Grant. Drunk cow parsley sleeps with foxgloves, fennel, geums, irises, in a total love-in-a mist embrace. I was here to celebrate my birthday at the Charleston Literary Festival, inspired by the spirit of the Bloomsbury Group. The line-up was graced with Tony Peake, Dexter Fletcher & Topher Campbell, on Derek Jarman’s life and creative career, and Deborah Levy unravelling her writing and sharing tender threads with us. Jarman, known for his queer activism and radical, collaborative and explicit films spoke through time to Levy’s deeply personal and fluid ways of writing. As my spring bloomed another year, they inspired us to keep turning towards your own practice and to refusing to apologise for being your fluid, creative self, and diving right in even with obstacles.
The rich creative pollen which stained my fingertips at Charleston was beginning to cross-pollinate as I stuck my hands into the earth at Sissinghurst. Although I remembered to be careful of thorns as I traced my fingers over the delicate flowers of Rosa ‘Mundi’, with its striking pink and white stripes. In 1937 Vita wrote about this rose in ‘Some Flowers’, where they reminded her of “red cherry juice generously stirred into a bowl of cream”. I weaved these enticing sweet summer delights into a bouquet along with bronze fennel, artichoke leaves, purple alliums, and honesty for Vita’s writing room in the tower. Inspired by the naturalistic displays of Constance Spry, Vita arranged these flowers in ways which allowed their own expression. There was something so freeing for me to create bouquets out of the queer space Vita created for herself and her lovers.
Being free to follow their own expression is becoming central to the new way Sissinghurst is managing roses, like Mundi. Traditionally the Sissinghurst method involved treating roses ‘meanly’, by hard cutting back stems and encouraging new growth from the base to encourage flowering. Yet with many roses suffering from issues such as climate change and increased risk of diseases, this has prompted a re-learning of how to prune them in a way which emulates Vita’s garden of free-flowing, tumbling roses.
Led by gardener Jade Wall, they are leaving new stems long and uncut, where roses can bend naturally, rather than being forced to flower profusely and wearing themselves out. By allowing the roses to be themselves, they will flower freely in their own way. When I inhale the sweet scent of these roses, I think about the ways I can let my own stems unravel beyond the garden walls, to flower when I have the energy, and how allowing things to just simply be leads to more flourishing for all.
I spent my last evening with a notebook soaking up the privacy of the garden after hours, the last of the sun catching the white garden before disappearing behind the wall. Vita’s writing and love went far beyond these borders and beds. I want to take this free fluid expression with me too before I leave the Castle behind and return to the streets of London. I am gifted a Hypericum olympicum ‘Citrinum’ from Karol in the nursery, and when I come to plant it, I will think of it as an act to keep remembering, learning, and creating Vita’s queer passion wherever I will garden.
Thank you so much to the team at Sissinghurst for having me!
For more stories like this, sign up to the Garden Museum newsletter