Vita Sackville-West

The photo above is of Sissinghurst's rose garden as seen from the tower. You can see how how Harold's green architecture contrasts and harmonizes with the billowing forms of Vita's plants. This photograph was taken by Dave Parker and may not be reproduced in any way without his permission; his website features many beautiful photographs of Sissinghurst Castle.

Vita was born on March 9, 1892 at her family's ancestral home of Knole, in Kent. Knole had belonged to the Archbishops of Canterbury from 1454 until Archbishop Cranmer gave it to Henry VII. Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I, gave Knole to her second cousin Thomas Sackville in 1566. Vita was his direct descendant. She was an only child and if she had been male she would have been her father's heir, but because she was female, she couldn't inherit Knole.

In the introduction to her book "Vita", an autobiography of Vita Sackville-West, Victoria Glendinning says that the first great sorrow of Vita's life was that, "by an accident of gender, Knole could never be hers; the second, the realization that she was not a great writer". This book doesn't contain a lot of information about Sissinghurst's gardens, but I strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in Vita's life.

Vita is very well known for the weekly gardening column that she wrote for the Observer from 1946 to 1961. I am not fond of most poetry, so it is difficult for me to compare these columns with her poetry, but I am not alone in saying that I much prefer her gardening columns. This would probably exasperate Vita because she always claimed that she only wrote the column for money and that she resented the time that it took away from her more serious writing. I suspect that the reason why most people prefer her column is that her "serious" writing is self-consciously artistic and highly polished, while her column had a weekly deadline, so she didn't have time to polish the life out of her words. An excellent example of Vita using her skills as a poet to write about mundane subjects is her description of foliage plants: "The expression foliage plants carries something of a Victorian sound for us, like the echoing of a gong through a linoleumed, lin-crustaed boarding-house, but in spite of this grim association some of the foliage plants hold a high decorative value in the garden." Vita may not rank among the greatest poets of all time, but as a garden writer she can only be equaled - never surpassed.