My last blog took a tour around some of the big gardens at Chelsea 2024, but of course there is much more to the show. Lining the avenues throughout the grounds are booths of varying sizes showcasing art, clothing, garden furnishings, tools, pots and planters, house plants, etc. while inside the Great Pavilion are nurseries and plant societies, floral designers and ecological/scientific displays. Let’s start with the spectacular floral acronym for the Royal Horticultural Society, as interpreted in UK-grown peonies by the upscale floral designer Pinstripes & Peonies.
Here is a small bit of the letter “S”. Imagine how much work it took to condition all those peonies and then insert them into the matrix using “eco-friendly principles”….. which I assume must mean floral-oasis-free, though I wasn’t able to confirm that.
Artists have long been a part of Chelsea, which is now in its 111th year. The best show off their works in small gardens, like Scots sculptor James Parker below. who chose rodgersia, Siberian iris and foxglove to complement his stacked slate and bronze pinecone sculptures.
The Clancy Workshop took a more lighthearted approach at Chelsea. Architect/artist Mike Clancy positions his sculptures, like these animals, between art and architecture using traditional and digital techniques.
I’ve taken the odd stroll through Harrod’s in London but I wasn’t aware there is also Harrod Horticultural – unrelated to the department store, but obviously benefiting at the show from the similarity in names. Its horticultural line is an offshoot of its business as a long-time supplier of sport goalposts – including to the Olympics!
Garden buildings come in all shapes and sizes in England, and those displayed by Scotts of Shrapston, celebrating its 60th anniversary, seemed quite modest.
But it was the lovely landscaping around their shed that I loved featuring Siberian iris and an unusual umbellifer, Baltic parsley (Cenolothium denudatum).
At Garden Art Plus Limited, this 18th century French limestone trough with lion’s paws feet and mossy patina could be had for the trifling sum of £12,500.
Solus Decor started in “a humble single car garage in 1998” in Vancouver, B.C. where they now have an 18,000 sq ft location, and expanded to four locations worldwide from which they export to 35 countries. They make fire pits, fire tables and fire bowls, and if those get too… fiery…
…. they also have compact water fountains.
As the rain increased, it was a pleasure to wander into the Great Pavilion where Pheasant Acre Plants were showing off their gladioli.
Moore & Moore Plants are woodland specialists and their exhibit was a lush celebration of ferns and flowering shade-lovers.
I was enchanted with the stunning display of plant treasures by Kevock Garden Plants of Scotland, including many beautiful meconopsis species….
….. such as the rare, red M. staintonii.
Look at all those primulas!
The display was designed by Monica Wylie and I asked her to pose for me for this blog.
And what a serendipitous delight to find my Seattle ‘horty’ friend Sue Nevler and her husband Steve Gatti admiring the Kevock exhibit. After hugs and introductions all round, Sue & I posed with Kevock’s owner David Rankin – with Himalayan poppies posing above us! We were heading on to Tuscany to see our youngest son and Sue and Steve were heading to Malta, then France.
Grow just two things, but grow them very well. That could be the motto of Blackmore & Langdon’s, with their luscious begonias and delphiniums. And I swear I made the identical photo 32 years ago, when I was last at the Chelsea!
This delicate foxglove is Digitalis ‘Apple Blossom’.
W.S. Warmenhoven displayed a trove of Amaryllis and Alliums in the pavilion. A family company established in the Netherlands in 1885, they grow 55 varieties of allium, something like a million bulbs in their fields and greenhouses. There, they sell the blooms as cut flowers at the Dutch Flower Auction and harvest the bulbs for their bulb business.
I’ve never grown Allium schubertii with its big, low-growing, starry globes, but I liked ‘Arctic Snow’.
Allium macleanii is a parent of ‘Globemaster’ and I was delighted to photograph it. I wish I could source this one in Canada, because I find the other parent, A. cristophii or star-of-Persia attracts bees but ‘Globemaster’ doesn’t, presumably sterile and also not a big nectar producer. One of my reasons for growing alliums is their great attraction to bees.
Jacques Amand had two side-by-side exhibits displaying a large range of perennials, bulbs and small trees – and they won two Chelsea Gold Medals for their efforts.
Caley Brothers sells edible and medicinal mushrooms and wanted their Chelsea display “to inspire visitors to get growing their own delicious mushrooms through a series of easy to grow projects. Regardless of space, budget or season,” they say they have a mushroom project to suit every gardener – and have written their own book called “Project Mushroom”.
Hampshire Carnivorous Plants is the UK’s largest grower of carnivorous plants. They had a colourful display featuring loads of pitcher plants (Sarracenia spp.) and maidenhair ferns and a Jurassic dinosaur. They also sell nepenthes, Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) and sundews (Drosera); the latter at least, have been traced to the Jurassic Age.
What insect could resist the alluring pitchers of Sarracenia ‘Juthatip Soper’?
We played along, not very convincingly, since we all know dinosaurs are herbivores, right?
Driftwood Bonsai had a handsome display along the wall of the pavilion.
On the far wall, Kelnan Plants featured a lush display of South African natives, included many Resionaceae species.
As we were leaving to head to a pub lunch, I spied a visitor preparing to try on a garment at Original Fibres. It produces 100% European wool and linen clothing for men – I loved their springy planter design.
And I confess, I sneaked a photo of what might be the most beautiful garment I saw at the Chelsea on this rainy May Wednesday. But a little online detective work let me know that, sadly, I need to upgrade my shopping experience to Dolce & Gabbana. Because who wouldn’t want to stay dry under raindrops on spectacular wisteria blossoms?
And that’s a Chelsea wrap. I missed about one-third of the show, thanks to Mother Nature, jet lag and basic energy level, but I had a truly wonderful morning and sparked a little horticultural fire in my younger menfolk! Stay tuned for future blogs on the Chelsea Physic Garden, the Garden Museum and the fabulous Moat in Bloom at London Bridge.
Before I get to Somerset, a memory. On a trip to South Africa almost a decade ago, I enjoyed all the gardens our tour guide Donna Dawson had organized, but my very favourite was Babylonstoren in the Franschhoek wine district outside Cape Town. “Bedazzled by Babylonstoren” is the blog I wrote on my autumn 2014 visit. It combined all the best features of a truly great garden: a stunning design by Italian-French architect Patrice Taravella; diverse and beautiful ornamental and edible plantings, all organic; a vineyard that stretched for miles; a gift shop and charming farm-to-table restaurant; and an elegant spa hotel whose cottages nestled along the edge of the gardens. All that in a picturesque setting overlooked by the craggy peaks of Simonsberg.
So when Babylonstoren’s owners, telecom billionaire Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, the former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, came to England looking for a farm in the country, it made perfect sense that they would choose an historic 17th century estate in leafy Somerset. That rumor has it they had to outbid actor Johnny Depp to make their successful £12 million purchase only added to the cachet. Then they spent 6 years developing the property, working again with Patrice Taravella to create a second unique, complex organic garden and farm while transforming the house into an exclusve hotel & spa. The map below is available as a detailed pdf online.
Somehow, as we drew into The Newt’s parking lot on my June 2023 visit with Carex Tours, I knew most of the details about our upcoming visit and fondly remembered visiting Babylonstoren, but I hadn’t yet learned the actual name of the historic house that became the hotel. When our guide said “Hadspen” my heart leapt, for this had been the home of the renowned garden writer, designer and colourist, Penelope Hobhouse, who later leased it to the Canadian gardeners Nori and Sandra Pope, who went on to create what became an iconic walled garden focused on colour. Noel Kingsbury wrote an affectionate essay on the Popes, the Hobhouse estate and the drama associated with its direction. As many of my readers likely know, I’ve long had an interest in colour in the garden, focusing on it in my blog and in my photography. But 25 years ago, I also wrote a book review, below, for my column in Toronto Life Gardens on Nori and Sandra Pope’s book ‘Color by Design, so I was very familiar with the colour ethos of Hadspen House. Would I find it today? Stay tuned.
We entered The Newt via a gatehouse and a long, sinuous boardwalk through rich woodland.
Stacks of cut wood were placed along the pathway like mossy, natural works of art that double as habitat.
I walked through the entrance courtyard past the threshing barn, cyder bar and gift shop and made my way quickly to the Cottage Garden below. Beyond that was the Fragrance Garden and Cascades. (Though hotel guests have access to the gardens, Hadspen House itself is off-limits to garden visitors – I tried.)
There were familiar pairings of lavender and lambs’ ears…
…. and Jerusalem sage (Phlomis russelliana) with pale yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium striatum)…
… and in the Cascades, moisture-loving Rodgersia pinnata ‘Superba’ with primulas and royal ferns.
The Cascades features a waterfall emptying into a rectilinear pool planted with waterlilies.
Next, I came to my favourite part of The Newt, the Colour Garden. It is actually a series of wattle-walled, colour-themed gardens bisected by a stone path, and you can view what’s ahead through oval windows in the wall of each garden.
Alongside, there was a touching dedication to Sandra and the late Nori Pope.
It pleased me that the new owners understood how well-loved the Popes had been, and how many people missed their creativity, including Vancouver landscape architect Ron Rule, who captured Sandra in the garden long ago.
Photo courtesy of Ron Rule Consultants Ltd., West Vancouver, B.C.
The Newt’s version of the Colour Garden begins with a Green Garden with lots of ornamental grasses and green-flowered plants like tall Angelica archangelica…
….. and euphorbias, too.
Then comes the spectacular little Red Garden….
…. with dancing corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) and swishing Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima). I noticed angelica in that garden as well – such a great plant for pollinators.
In early June, the Red Garden stretched the colour palette into hot pinks and magenta with Carthusian pink (Dianthus carthusianorum) and masterwort (Astrantia major).
A bumble bee was foraging on the geum.
It was a terribly sunny day (how could that happen for so many days in a row in England?) so my photos of The Blue Garden in particular were difficult.
Amsonia and cornflowers took centre stage. but there were campanulas and delphiniums sprinkled in as well.
Navy-blue honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) was a feature in many of the gardens I visited in England.
The White Garden is the final colour garden….
…. and the predominant plants in bloom in early June were the Hybrid Musk rose ‘Kew Gardens’ (which I had photographed earlier that week at RBG Kew in London) and the white form of red valerian or Jupiter’s beard, Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’.
On leaving the Colour Garden, I took a stroll down the Long Walk which moves down a gentle slope flanked by a stone wall overhung with white Jupiter’s beard (Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’). In the background is the hotel.
The Long Walk has its own water features like this pool at the top….
…. and a square waterlily pool fed by a rill, beyond which is another pool. In the distance are two screened houses in the produce garden.
Then it was into the Parabola Garden. In the language of mathematics, a parabola is a U- or D-shaped curve that features a vertex and symmetrical axis – like a rainbow, for instance. The Newt’s version occupies a walled garden that was originally designed as a kitchen garden by Henry Hobhouse II. Two centuries later, it was framed by Sandra and Nori Pope’s iconic colour border, below.
Photo courtesy of Ron Rule Consultants Ltd., West Vancouver, B.C.
Today, the Parabola Garden is designed as a maze and home to a collection of 267 cultivars of apple trees representing each apple-growing county of England. They grow in cordons, fan-espaliers and various other space-conserving methods. (The Cyder Bar near the garden’s entrance also pays homage to apples and features tastings.) That stone wall at the top of the photo below surrounds the garden and….
…. features the names of the apple-growing counties. Each year in the 3rd week of October, the Newt hosts a celebration called Apple Day featuring juice pressing, apple games and recipes.
Although England is famous for its hen parties, the Parabola Garden features the real thing. This pair obviously wandered up from the henhouse below.
Yet another water feature forms a central focal point in The Parabola.
Then it was under the Caterpillar Tunnel weaving through meadows towards the Produce Garden.
The base of the tunnel is planted with tromboncino, bottleneck and other varieties of squash which create a leafy canopy by late summer.
I loved the shadow play along the path.
Chives, herbs and vegetable seedlings were newly planted in mulched beds separated by pretty wattle screens. More than 350 varieties of edibles are planted here.
Coldframes held plants too tender to be planted out just yet.
And an oak-timbered fruit cage, one of a pair, protected berry bushes from hungry birds and critters.
I heard there were living newts in the produce garden’s raised, naturalistic pond, but I looked in vain. However, I did spy a handsome, green-eyed emperor dragonfly (Anax imperator).
Sadly, it was time to make my way back to the bus via a quick stop for a delicious al fresco lunch. Afterwards, I had just a few minutes to take a walk through the Winter Garden, kept at 20-25C all year long and filled with ferns, orchids, succulents, tropical fruits and tender beauties from far away…..
….. like the South American firecracker plant (Dicliptera suberecta).
And how did The Newt compare to Babylonstoren? I think they were as different from each other as Somerset apples are to Franschhoek wine grapes, yet they share the same elegant rusticity and exquisite attention to detail. And though The Newt pays homage to its English garden roots, to the Hobhouse and Pope eras, it is very much its own lovely creature, still young and growing, but looking to the future, not the past.
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The Newt is open to visitors by annual membership only and includes many benefits, including free garden tours, special events and an impressive list of seasonal workshops. It also includes entrance to partner gardens including Kew, Wakehurst, Blenheim, Great Dixter, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Tresco, Chatworth and others. Clearly, amidst all the comings-and-goings of a working farm and an award-winning boutique hotel, it is aiming for a level of exclusivity and community.
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Here are my blogs on a few of the other English gardens I visited in 2023:
Having visited and often written about Dutch designer Piet Oudolf’s garden on the High Line in many seasons – May, June, mid-summer and autumn; having blogged about his fabulous Lurie Garden in Chicago; but mostly having photographed and written about the seasons passing in the Oudolf-designed entry border at Toronto Botanical Garden, a few miles from my home, I was beyond excited to finally visit Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Gallery at Dunslade Farm in Somerset, near Bruton. First we walked through the gallery, one of 21 galleries worldwide founded originally in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan and Manuela Wirth along with Manuela’s mother, art patron and collector Ursula Hauser. The Somerset gallery resulted from the renovation of a collection of old farm buildings and is located near the Wirths’ home. Like all their galleries, it features high-profile modern artists such as Americans Richard Jackson, below…
… and Paul McCarthy, whose silicone White Snow Dwarves, below, from the Ursula Hauser collection was displayed near the exit to the garden.
Leaving the gallery which was designed by Argentine-born architect Luis Laplace, visitors pass through a cloister garden designed by Piet Oudolf and featuring the sculpture Lemur Heads by Franz West. Unlike the meadow beyond, this space contains woodlanders and shade-tolerant species.
The small trees in this garden are paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) with their fuzzy, globular female flowers.
Martagon lilies were just beginning to show colour.
We began with a talk from head gardener Mark Dumbelton, who spoke about the beginnings of the garden and expanded on some of its challenges, mainly around the soil. Indeed, when we visited England was on its way to enduring the hottest June on record since 1884, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, and watering was being done by hand. Behind Mark, I noticed the white inflorescences of….
Ornithogalum ponticum ‘Sochi’, a Russian native bulb that contrasts well with emerging grasses and makes a good cut flower.
Near the gallery is a naturalistic pond surrounded by pink flowering rush (Butomnus umbellatus).
You can see the pond at the left, below, on Piet’s colourful 2012 plan for the wildflower meadow in the Hauser & Wirth catalogue. Spread out over 1.5 acres are seventeen curved, informal planting beds separated by a central gravel path as well as lawn paths between the beds and surrounded by an existing hedge, beyond which Piet planted trees.
He explained his rationale for Oudolf Field in the video below.
With Mark’s talk finished, we were set loose in the meadow. I viewed it through spires of peach foxtail lily (Eremurus), a lovely perennial for early summer whose….
….. tall inflorescences never fail to attract the attention of visitors – and bees! This one looks like the Dutch cultivar Eremurus x isabellinus ‘Romance’.
I was intrigued by the ten turf circles in the central path through the meadow. The path lets visitors stroll from one end to the other, but the playful circles relieve the tedium of this long expanse of purposeful gravel.
They are so unlike Piet’s characteristic naturalistic style, but in fact they point to his pragmatic design knowledge and site adaptability. (Yes, he designs woodlands and knows shrubs and trees as well as his favourite perennials!)
I was reminded in studying these circles of my own visit to Piet and Anja’s garden in Hummelo, Netherlands in 1999 which was designed in part to reflect one of his early Dutch influences, the great designer Mien Ruys (1904-99), the so-called “mother of modernist gardens”. Both his famous hedges and circle gardens, below, were his interpretation of what has been called “contemporary formalism” by his frequent literary collaborator Noel Kingsbury.
I feel very fortunate to have spoken with Piet then, at the beginning of his international fame. I made a photo of him at their outdoor table with spring-flowering shrubs in flower around us. Anja was in their nursery (gone now) with customers, and their little dog sat in a chair nearby.
Back to Oudolf Field, the overwhelming mood here on June 9th was of soft pastel mauves and blues amidst the emerging green of the grasses and summer perennials. Eastern beebalm (Monarda bradburiana) native to the American southeast was in full flower in front of the blue blossoms of narrowleaf bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii), a south-central American native that turns brilliant chartreuse-gold in autumn. Emerging through the grasses were the big starry globes of star-of-Persia allium (A.cristophii).
I had never seen Monarda bradburiana before spotting it in Piet’s design at the High Line years ago. Like many of the plants he uses – and sometimes introduces to commerce – it has withstood his field testing at Hummelo. This compact species has the good characteristics of the beebalms, including pollinator appeal, without the negative drawbacks, such as powdery mildew.
Early June, following the explosion of spring bulbs and before the summer abundance of flowering perennials is sometimes considered an “in-between” time in the garden. That quiet interlude is helped immensely by the many ornamental onions, and Piet uses them to great advantage in all his gardens, both for their flowers and later seedheads. Below, again, you see Allium cristophii along with the Corten steel edging used to delineate the beds.
After seeing Allium atropurpureum, below, amidst grasses, I came back to Canada and immediately ordered some for my own June garden.
Here is Allium atropurpureum with Amsonia hubrichtii.
… and with Oenothera lindheimeri, i.e. gaura.
Looking back to the gallery through the gardens, including dark-leaved penstemons.
Piet uses various low grasses as matrix plants, including Sporobolus heterolepis, below, and Sesleria autumnalis.
The weather was so warm the day we were there in this record-setting dry June, the assistant gardener was working full-time to water.
While the garden is situated within pre-existing hedges, Piet planted trees on the boundary to contain it further.
The Pavilion, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić and installed in March 2015, sits at the end of Oudolf Field and is intended to “create a dialogue between the gallery complex and pavilion and their relationship with the garden”. Radić says it is “part of a history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies.” Built of white, translucent fibreglass with cedar flooring and set atop large quarry stones, visitors can view the garden from within the shell.
Heading into the gallery for lunch, I passed the attractive bar — a work of art in itself.
It was a lunch I would have enjoyed much more if I hadn’t been feeling the beginnings of what turned out to be my first case of Covid in more than 3 years– and the unexpected and sudden end later that night of my wonderful English garden tour. But I was so delighted to have experienced yet another masterpiece in the always-varied oeuvre of Piet Oudolf.
Of all the gardens I’ve visited that merit the phrase ‘world-class’, Sissinghurst is near the top, along with neighbouring Great Dixter which I wrote about in my last blog post. It’s not vast in scope, like Philadelphia’s Chanticleer (which I’ve written about a few times), nor does it have the artistic allure of Monet’s garden at Giverny (my spring visit is here), but it has the cult of personality of its founders, the enigmatic author Vita Sackville-West, seen below in a 1918 painting by William Strang, and her diplomat husband Harold Nicolson. In what has been called “an unconventional but harmonious marriage” during which they wrote a combined 70 books, they each had a series of same-sex affairs including Vita with fellow Bloomsbury Group writer Virginia Woolf, who in 1928 wrote Orlando: A Biography, inspired by her lover: a time-travel, gender-bending novel that has been adapted as a film and stage play .
Harold and Vita were also parents of two sons, Nigel and Ben, though Nigel remembered his mother for her frequent abandonments to be with her lovers. In 1973, he would publish ‘Portrait of a Marriage’, incorporating a memoir he found after his mother’s death exploring what she called her “duality” and her relationships with women, along with his own observations of his parents’ loving marriage. But together, Vita and Harold were deeply committed to the garden they designed on the large, run-down property they purchased in 1930. Vita was the romantic plantswoman; Harold was in charge of structure. He created formal rooms hedged in yew; she filled them with old French roses, peonies, irises and spring bulbs. Beyond her novels and books containing her epic poems ‘The Land’ (1926) and ‘The Garden’ (1946), she also penned a weekly column titled In Your Garden in The Observer from 1946 to 1957, later published as a 4-book anthology, below, and still available online.
Sissinghurst was the reason for my early June stay in Kent, courtesy of my London-based son Doug and his partner Tommy. Since we arrived early from our lovely Airbnb in nearby Biddenden and the garden only opens at 11 am, we had lots of time to cool our heels, walking from the parking lot on a path between the timber fence where native red campion (Silene dioica) competed with stinging nettles (Urtica dioica).
We passed the plant shop, where visitors could buy roses….
…. or any number of perennials, below.
We took a moment to gaze across the green fields of Sissinghurst’s 460 acres on the Weald of Kent, of which 5 are intensively gardened and 180 acres are woodland. Here, visitors can walk their dogs, bird-watch and hike to their heart’s content. And thanks to writer Adam Nicolson, Vita and Harold’s grandson (and the husband of British garden maven Sarah Raven), we have a beautifully-written recollection of the farm fields that enlivened Sissinghurst and gave it real purpose when he was a boy – and his own quest to return the working farm to the estate. This is from the excerpted first chapter of his lyrical book Sissinghurst – A Castle’s Unfinished History (2010).
“Remembering what had been here, I came to realize what had gone: the sense that the landscape around the house and garden was itself a rich and living organism. By 2004, all that had been rubbed away. An efficiently driven tourist business, with an exquisite garden at its center, was now set in the frame of a rather toughened and empty landscape. It sometimes seemed as if Sissinghurst had become something like a Titian in a car park.”
We settled into the restaurant until opening time. One of the charms of Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which is run by the National Trust but relies heavily on volunteers, is that there are small touches like the pretty bouquets of flowers from the cutting garden. This one features biennial dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) with annual cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus), golden alexanders (Smyrnium perfoliatum) and corn cockle (Agrostemma githago).
This posy featured many of the purples, blues and pinks that Vita adored.
There was a display of blue glass in one of the café windows, presumably part of Vita’s collection of coloured glass.
Attached to the Granary Restaurant are the oasthouse and rondels. Built around 1880, they were still in use to dry and store hops for beer-brewing in 1966, a vital part of the hop-farming industry of Kent which continues to this day. Author George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) picked hops in the region in the summer of 1931.
Sissinghurst’s garden rooms are shown on the map below:
A – Priest’s House & White Garden; B – Delos; C – Top Courtyard, West Range and Purple Border; D – Entrance; E – Tower and Lower Courtyard; F – Yew Walk; G – Orchard; H – Rose Garden; I – South Cottage and Cottage Garden; J – Moat Walk and Azaleas; K – Nuttery; L – Herb Garden; M – Lime Walk
I was first in line when the gates opened at 11 am, and as someone who has made “colour in the garden” a focus of my work, I wasted no time heading into one of the gardening world’s best-known meccas, the White Garden. Wrote Vita Sackville-West: “I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden. This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it … All the same, I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight — the pale garden that I am now planting under the first flakes of snow. ”
June is the perfect time to see a White Garden, as I would also discover in the beautiful version designed by Mat Reese at Malverleys later in the week. There are numerous white-flowered perennials, such as the bearded iris (possibly ‘White City’) and peony (likely ‘Festiva Maxima’), below…..
…. and lupines, softened by white-flowered umbellifers such as cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) and annual Ammi majus.
A statue stood in the shadow of a weeping silver pear tree (Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula). Alas, a sunny June day in England and Sissinghurst’s late opening time meant bright contrast for photography, but we garden tourists take what we can get.
Minoan lace flower (Orlaya grandiflora) has become increasingly popular as a self-seeding annual in gardens. White foxgloves and the white-flowered form of red valerian (Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’) add to the display, along with silvery artemisia.
Centaurea montana ‘Amethyst in Snow’ was introduced by my Facebook friend John Grimshaw of the Yorkshire Arboretum in 2000 and is now sold around the world, sometimes as ‘Purple Heart’.
When I was walking out of the White Garden past the Priest’s House to head into the new Delos Garden, I spied this bellflower growing on the wall. It is Dalmatian bellflower (Campanula portenschlagiana); perhaps unsurprisingly, it was once called C. muralis from the Latin ‘of walls’
Delos was a surprise. When we visited Sissinghurst for the first time more than 30 years ago, this part of the garden – originally inspired by a 1935 trip Vita and Harold made to the monument-rich Greek island – was not on view, or certainly unmemorable. In 2018, Sissinghurst head gardener Troy Scott-Smith asked landscape designer Dan Pearson to re-invent the space. Dan wrote a beautiful essay for his newsletter Dig Delve about the process, including a childhood recollection by Adam Nicolson.
An enthusiastic volunteer was on hand in the Delos Garden to help visitors with plant identification.
Wherever I went in England in June – including a visit to Dan Pearson’s garden the following week which I blogged about – I saw giant fennel. In Delos, Dan chose to use Ferula communis subsp. glauca. As he wrote in an essay in Dig Delve, “This is the most elegant of all, in my opinion, for its slender limbs and burnished dark green leaf. I have planted it amongst the rockscape of the re-imagined Delos Garden I recently designed at Sissinghurst.”
Like all giant fennels, it has a bright, yellow inflorescence.
In the garden stand three Greek marble altars originally brought from Delos in the 1820s, as Adam Nicolson recounted in Dig Delve. “There is one element that reaches further back into history than the dreams of the 1930s: three cylindrical Greek marble altars, originally carved in the 3rd or 4th century BC decorated around their waists with swags of grape, pomegranate and myrtle suspended between garlanded bull-heads – boukrania – which now stand at key intervals along the central street of the garden.”
Of their provenance, Adam wrote: “Harold Nicolson’s great-grandfather was Commodore William Gawen Rowan Hamilton, a naval commander in the first years of the nineteenth century, a heroic and romantic figure and passionate Philhellene, who spent the years from 1820 onwards in the eastern Mediterranean, winning the title of ‘Liberator of Greece’ by protecting the Greek rebels against the Turks From time to time during his cruises attacking pirates and fending off the Turk, he would land on an island or a piece of the Turkish-occupied mainland and quietly liberate an antiquity or two, sending them back to his liberal father-in-law in Ireland, Major-General Sir George Cockburn, a flamboyant antiquary who had made a collection of Greek statuary at Shanganagh, his castle outside Dublin.” It was when the Irish castle was sold in 1936 that Harold Nicholson purchased the Delian altars and brought them to Sissinghurst.
As an aside, these days Delos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its monuments safe from pirates of all stripes. When I visited in October 2011, below, it made me long to return in spring when the wildflowers were blooming.
Other Mediterranean flowers in the Delos garden include asphodels (Asphodeline lutea)….
…. pinks (Dianthus spp.)……
….. rock roses (Cistus) with happy hoverflies….
….. and the flamboyant red Paeonia perigrina with a visiting bumble bee.
Then it was out of the Delos Garden and off through the 16th century Tudor Tower that once held Vita’s writing room. Sissinghurst was owned by the Baker family from 1490. The first buildings were constructed around 1535 by Sir John Baker, Henry VIII’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir John’s daughter Cicely married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset – thus a connection to Vita Sackville-West four centuries later. The tower, octagonal turret and a large courtyard house were built by Sir John’s son Richard Baker between 1560-1574; Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed a stay here at that time. The Baker family fortunes declined and two centuries later, the house and tower were requisitioned by the state to house 3,000 French prisoners-of-war during the Seven Years War 1756 -1763. There is still graffiti in French from those prisoners on the walls of the tower. Later it became a parish poorhouse and farm, including hop-growing. Around 1800, the main house was demolished by its new owner. When Vita and Harold bought Sissinghurst in 1930, she refurbished the three-storey tower, adding a fireplace to the ground floor room and creating a writing space and library for herself upstairs. It has recently been renovated, complete with her pink walls. During World War II, the tower was used as an observation post since the English Channel was effectively controlled by the Germans whose shelling of the Kent coastline and its towns, according to the BBC, led to the county being called “hellfire corner” and “bomb alley”. (Sissinghurst has a long history nicely encapsulated here by the National Trust who took over the property in 1967, five years after Vita’s death.)
I found this photo in a Heritage Records document for Sissinghurst.
Clambering up the back of the Tower was Lady Banks rose (Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’) …..
….. with its clusters of pale yellow roses.
The courtyard adjacent to the Tower contains Vita’s Purple Border. When I visited, it was filled with Gladiolus byzantinus subsp. byzantinus, below, also beloved by Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garrett for the meadows at Great Dixter which I blogged about recently.
I loved the way the purple centres of Allium basalticum ‘Silver Spring’ echoed the colour of the gladioli.
There were so many lovely vignettes here, including the opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) with dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), but time was a-marching.
Then it was into the Rose Garden, with its lush profusion of roses surrounded by early June flowers such as blue Italian alkanet (Anchusa azurea) with magenta foxgloves and euphorbia, below.
It was utterly magnificent – and a little heartbreaking for a photographer hoping for just one cloud to float by above to soften the shadows.
Vita loved her roses. This is ‘Fantin-Latour’, a Centifolia named for the Impressionist painter and introduced into the UK in 1945. Pruning and training of roses is taken very seriously at Sissinghurst. According to Sarah Raven, wife of Vita’s grandson Adam Nicolson, “The big leggy shrubs, which put out great, pliable, triffid arms that are easy to tie down and train, are bent on to hazel hoops arranged around the skirts of the plant. Roses with this lax habit include ‘Constance Spry’, ‘Fantin-Latour’, ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’, ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’…”
Irises play a starring role in the Rose Garden in June. This is the bearded iris ‘Shannopin’, a 1940 American introduction grown by Vita that looked utterly lovely with the alliums just going over.
Siberian iris (Iris sibirica) grow in the mix in the Rose Garden, here with dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and red campion (Silene dioica).
Annual honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) with its sensuous blue bracts is used extensively at Sissinghurst, here with ranunculus.
Yellow lupines make an appearance in the Rose Garden as well. (I’ve read the odd comment that yellow is discordant in this garden, but when you already have a Purple Border filled with purple, mauve, blue and pink flowers, it seems to me that the odd splash of yellow is perfectly fine.)
Moving out of the Rose Garden, I found the Lime Walk: an allée of pleached linden trees (Tilia platyphyllos ‘Rubra’). Unlike the rest of the gardens at Sissinghurst, this was all Harold Nicolson’s creation, not Vita’s – he called it “my life’s work”. It is underplanted with masses of spring bulbs, making overplanting difficult, thus it looked a little bare in early June.
The statue at its terminus is a Bacchante commissioned by the National Trust from sculptor Simon Smith who carved it using Carrara marble from the Cava di Michelangelo and installed it in 2016. On his page, the artist says: “The sculpture depicts a dancing girl, slightly drunk, who has suddenly noticed something in the distance”. What could it be?
If he were a little closer, she might have noticed the young man below, standing in a shade-dappled carpet of ferns in The Nuttery. In the spring of 1930, when Harold and Vita were considering whether to buy Sissinghurst with its ruined buildings, Harold wrote: ‘We come suddenly upon a nut walk and that settles it…’ The garden features 56 coppiced hazels (Corylus avellana) and a variety of woodland plants.
The Moat Walk features Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’ espaliered on a brick wall facing an azalea bank across the lawn.
After the cool green of the Lime Walk and Nuttery, the South Cottage Garden — my final stop — was a burst of June sunshine with its warm palette of yellow, chartreuse, orange and red. I would have stayed here a long time if we hadn’t had to find lunch before visiting Great Dixter in the afternoon.
You can see a little of the South Cottage behind the geums and irises….
…. and the wallflowers. When Vita and Harold bought Sissinghurst in 1930, the cottage was a fragment of the ruins of the original 1570 house. They restored and extended it that decade and it became the intimate place where each had a bedroom and Harold had his office overlooking the garden.
The colours here seem to glow, including the lacy yellow fumitory (Corydalis lutea), hakonechloa grass and golden iris….
…. and the night-scented flowers of the unusual evening primrose Oenothera stricta ‘Sulphurea’.
Corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) were sprinkled about….
…. and it was a thrill, in my final moments at Sissinghurst, to glimpse the last of all tulips to flower, the tall, blazing-red Tulipa sprengeri. What a joy this sunny June garden was, as were the pale flowers in the White Garden and the abundance of the Rose Garden.
I will leave the last words to Vita Sackville-West, from her poem The Garden (1945)
Sweet June. Is she of Summer or of Spring, Of adolescence or of middle-age? A girl first marvelling at touch of lovers Or else a woman growing ripely sage? Between the two she delicately hovers, Neither too rakish nor, as yet, mature. She’s not a matron yet, not fully sure; Neither too sober nor elaborate; Not come to her fat state. She has the leap of youth, she has the wild Surprising outburst of an earnest child. Sweet June, dear month, while yet delay Wistful reminders of a dearer May; June, poised between, and not yet satiate.
Whenever I visit London, I’m awed, architecturally speaking, by the easy and fluid juxtaposition of the very new and the very, very old. I felt that especially during a late October visit to the Tate Modern Gallery, the former 1947 Bankside Power Station with its massive turbine hall, beautifully converted and opened in 2000 to showcase modern art. In the fourteen years since then, an astonishing 40 million people have visited. Gazing down on the turbine hall, I could only imagine how it must have looked carpeted in ceramic sunflower seeds during the Ai Weiwei show a few years back.
A little later, while lunching on a delicate grapefruit & watercress salad, I paused to gaze out the Tate’s window across the Thames River. A landscape in moody autumn grey, the far shore is dominated by the magnificent dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral atop Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London (though it barely feels like a hill when you’re on it).
I tried to imagine how London must have looked in the early 1600s before the great fire that burned down the previous cathedral and forty acres of the city. Actually, you don’t have to imagine; you can get a feel for that in this 1616 etching, in which the largest building is St. Paul’s Cathedral. That church was the third dedicated to St. Paul to occupy the site, the first having been built in 604 AD.
Three days after the Great London Fire ignited on September 2, 1666 in a bakery on Pudding Lane, the old St. Paul’s Cathedral (depicted at the centre left of this painting) lay in smoldering ashes. At the time of the fire, architect Christopher Wren had been advising the Anglican Diocese of London on repairs to the old church. After the fire, he was commissioned to design a new cathedral.
Though its construction required a span of 35 years from 1675 to 1710, religious services began there in 1697. More than three centuries later, it has seen dozens of royal weddings, funerals and coronations – not to mention surviving World War II’s Blitz. And because this is (nominally) a garden blog, I offer a view of it through a venerable old London plane tree (Platanus x acerifolia) growing nearby.
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When the Millennium Bridge opened to pedestrians on June 10, 2000, there was one tiny problem. It wobbled. Quite a lot. Having just got over fears of everything from laptops to planet earth crashing as the new millennium dawned, people were understandably shaken, not stirred. So two days later, the footbridge was closed and the structural experts called in to have a look. According to Wikipedia:, “The bridge’s movements were caused by a ‘positive feedback’ phenomenon, known as synchronous lateral excitation. The natural sway motion of people walking caused small sideways oscillations in the bridge, which in turn caused people on the bridge to sway in step, increasing the amplitude of the bridge oscillations and continually reinforcing the effect. On the day of opening the bridge was crossed by 90,000 people, with up to 2,000 on the bridge at any one time.”
The Millennium Bridge took two years to fix. How? According to Wiki, “By the retrofitting of 37 fluid-viscous dampers (energy dissipating) to control horizontal movement and 52 tuned mass dampers (inertial) to control vertical movement”. Controlling the bridge’s natural wobble cost £5M and inspired an acoustic art installation at the Tate called ‘Harmonic Bridge’ which amplified the sound of the cables through the Turbine Hall.
Crossing the bridge today, you have a wonderful sightline to St. Paul’s on the north bank.
One of the most interesting new buildings in London sits between the heads of my husband and eldest son in this family shot taken on the bridge. Opened in 2012 and reaching 1,014 feet at its pointy top, The Shard, as it’s known, is the tallest building in the European Union. Designed by Renzo Piano, who was reportedly inspired by sailing ship masts and the London spires in Venice painter Canaletto’s works, it got its name from a report by English Heritage which complained that the design was “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London”.
I rather like Renzo Piano’s Shard, and despite what the English Heritage stuff-shirts say, I think those who make the climb to the top and gaze out on the 2000-year old city stretched below will agree. Olde London, after all, has always been a magnet for the audacious and new.
