{"id":2278,"date":"2017-11-27T06:52:20","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T14:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=2278"},"modified":"2017-11-27T06:52:20","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T14:52:20","slug":"vita-in-november-and-december","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/vita-in-november-and-december\/","title":{"rendered":"Vita in November and December"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"V.<\/a>Damp, chilly, end-of November\/early-December days call for the kind of coziness that can only be achieved by curling up in a warm place with a hot drink and a good book.\u00a0 In my case, the most recent book was Stephanie Barron\u2019s The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

On the surface, the mystery\u2019s title is misleading.\u00a0 Any serious gardener knows that the \u201cWhite Garden\u201d belonged not to early twentieth century author, Virginia Woolf, but to her good friend and sometime paramour, Vita Sackville-West\u20141892-1962.\u00a0 The two writers led intertwined lives, along with their fellow members of the literary, artistic and aggressively bohemian Bloomsbury group.\u00a0 Without giving away critical plot details, it is enough to say that Barron assigns Woolf a pivotal role in the creation of the now-fabled White Garden at Sackville-West\u2019s estate, Sissinghurst.<\/p>\n

Vita pursued and achieved serious literary stature throughout her life, but these days she is best known for the garden she made with her husband, diplomat Harold Nicolson.\u00a0 Her adventures in horticulture, literature and travel also resulted in singularly beautiful garden writing, most frequently published in England\u2019s Observer <\/em>newspaper from 1946-1961.\u00a0 Garden writers still quote Vita all the time, because in addition to being an evocative prose stylist and a superb gardener, she was eminently quotable.<\/p>\n

\"V.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I frequently turn to Vita for inspiration.\u00a0 One of the best volumes in my gardener\u2019s library is a collection of her Observer<\/em> columns, V. Sackville-West: The Illustrated Garden Book.<\/em>\u00a0 The writing is a treat all by itself, but the anthology has a double layer of icing on the cake\u2014a forward by Oxford don and gardening authority Robin Lane Fox and gorgeous watercolor illustrations by Freda Titford.\u00a0 I have the hard cover edition, first published in 1986.\u00a0 It is still available from used book sellers, along with a subsequent paperback version.<\/p>\n

In November and December, Vita undertakes the obligatory writing about bark, berries and garden structure, but she dreams of flowers.\u00a0 She \u201crounds off November\u201d by describing a double handful of plants that make excellent flowering hedges, dwelling on the glories of roses, barberries, flowering quince and Japanese keria.\u00a0 While singing the praises of ornamental hedges, she also acknowledges life\u2019s realities, describing the thorny hedging plants that are most suitable \u201cfor the exclusion of cattle and small boys.\u2019<\/p>\n

When December arrives, the writer laments that it is hard to find even a few garden flowers to brighten up the indoor scene.\u00a0 Compensation at Sissinghurst comes in the form of winter-flowering cherry or Prunus subhirtella \u2018Autumnalis\u2019, which, at least for Sackville-West, produces branches for indoor forcing from November to March.\u00a0 She mentions the pink form of this small tree, but saves her highest praise of for winter-flowering cherries with pure white blossoms.\u00a0 Vita values the cherry\u2019s resilience: \u201cEven if frost catches some of the buds, it seems able, valiant little thing that it is, to create a fresh supply.\u201d<\/p>\n

One December column takes wing on the smallest puff of airy prose–\u201cIt is amusing to make one-color gardens.\u201d\u00a0 No one, probably least of all Vita, knew it at the time, but those words would turn out to be significant in the history of the Sissinghurst landscape and horticulture in general.\u00a0 The one color was, of course, white, which the author extended to include silvery and grayish white foliage plants like aromatic wormwood or Artemisia, and santolina, sometimes known as lavender cotton.\u00a0 Those colors came together at Sissinghurst in the area now known worldwide as the \u201cWhite Garden\u201d.\u00a0 It has been discussed and imitated ever since.<\/p>\n

Vita envisioned an array of classic spring and summer flowers, including \u201cdozens of Regale lilies\u201d or Lilium regale, shooting up amid the foliage plants.\u00a0 These showy, fragrant lilies, which are still best-sellers, soar to five feet tall, with each mature stalk bearing up to 25 golden-throated, white trumpets.\u00a0 The petal reverses show purple stripes.\u00a0 The garden Vita projected in the column would also be home to all kinds of romantic pale blooms, including \u201cwhite pansies, and white paeonies, and white irises with their grey leaves\u2026\u201d\u00a0 It was meant to be resplendent all the time, but especially luminous at twilight.<\/p>\n

The last paragraph of Vita\u2019s column on the White Garden is all anyone needs to set a scene and find inspiration, even on the most unpromising winter day:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026I 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.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damp, chilly, end-of November\/early-December days call for the kind of coziness that can only be achieved by curling up in a warm place with a hot drink and a good book.\u00a0 In my case, the most recent book was Stephanie Barron\u2019s The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf.\u00a0 On the surface, the mystery\u2019s title … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[505,1770,376,1766,1768,1769,834,832,907,1767],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-english-gardens","tag-freda-titford","tag-garden-literature","tag-garden-writers","tag-prunus-subhirtella-autumnalis","tag-robin-lane-fox","tag-sissinghurst","tag-vita-sackville-west","tag-white-gardens","tag-winter-flowering-cherry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2281,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/2281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}