MAY WE SUGGEST: The exquisite private gardens of Petworth House
The result, I think, is entirely successful. He has contrived in the most ingenious way, as you may appreciate from the accompanying photographs, to produce a design which combines formality with informality. He has managed to get long vistas over and over again, in a relatively small space. This makes the garden look far larger than in fact it is.
I had the smaller part. Harold Nicolson did the designing, and I did the planting. We made a good combination in this way: I could not possibly have drawn out the architectural lines of the garden, and he couldn’t possibly have planted it up, because he doesn’t know quite as much about plants as I do. This is not saying much, for I know very little, but he knows even less. But he does know how to draw the axis between one view point and another, and that is something I could never have accomplished. To sum up, I think I have-succeeded in making the garden pretty with my flowers, but the real credit is due to him, who drew its lines so well and so firmly that it can still be regarded with pleasure even in the winter months when all my flowers have vanished away and the skeleton is revealed.
Sissinghurst in 1942Shutterstock
Having paid this tribute to Harold Nicolson, I must go back to some details about the making of this garden and what we grow in it. We found it, as I have said, in a dreadful mess. The only thing we found of any interest was an old Gallica rose, then unknown to cultivation, which is now listed as Gallica var. Sissinghurst Castle at 10s. a plant by Messrs. Hilling of Chobham, to whom I gave some runners. Miss Nancy Lindsay, who is an expert on such matters, says that my old rose is Gallica Tour des Maures, a great rarity… that is as may be. I don’t know whether this shrubby, woody old rose I found ramping here is of any interest at all. I know only that it is fun and interesting to find anything growing on any old site, because you never know what it may tum out to be. This is the way in which many old plants are forgotten and then re-discovered, whether it is an old rose, an old primrose, an old double wallflower or sweet william, or what.
Apart from that, there was nothing, unless you count an old quince tree which certainly is a lovely sight in the spring, with its fiat, pinkish-white blossoms and its heavy golden fruit in autumn; in the intervening months it now has a clematis scrambling all over it, clothing it in purple.
The most urgent thing to do was to plant hedges. We were extravagant over this, and planted yew, and have never regretted it. Everybody told us it took at least a century to make a good yew hedge, but the photographs will, I think, disprove this: the hedge is now only seventeen years old, a mere adolescent, and, at the end where the ground slopes and it has been allowed to grow up in order to maintain the top-level, it is 16 feet high. This should he heartening to those who hesitate to plant yew. We did nothing particular to encourage it; we did not souse it with bullock’s blood or anything like that; but we did put in very young plants, what the nurserymen call I½ feet to 2 feet, which look more like the heads of a birchbroom dotted along a line than like anything which promises to become a solid hedge. We did this partly from motives of economy but also because I am a firm believer in young plants that have not had time to get settled in their ways. The percentage of loss is far smaller, in fact I don’t believe we lost a single one; and when they do “get away,” in the gardener’s phrase, they go ahead without check and far more vigorously. But it does demand a lot of patience, and for years our garden looked like a nursery garden with rows and rows of little Christmas-trees for sale. One has one’s rewards.
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