Long life
Yew are heaven
Nigel Nicolson
Summer has arrived, and the wet cool- ness that delayed it has had its compensa- tions. As one of the visitors to our garden remarked, 'Bad weather for us is good weather for the plants, and as I cannot work in my garden, I can visit yours'. That is typical of our good-natured audience, and I like to call them that, for they are spectators of a performance that has taken a very long time to rehearse, and a garden is not unlike a play. We have now reached Act II, scene 2. The visitors flood in to see the roses at their best.
One of the consequences of being famous is that you become more famous. If you are a manufacturer of cornflakes, it helps if your name is Kellogg. But if your work is to care for a large garden open to the public, it does not help if its name is Sissinghurst. When the annual total of visitors reached 200,000 three years ago, it became essential to limit the numbers if the garden was not to be eroded by the passage of innocent feet. The National Trust thought up an ingenious solution. On busy days visitors may have to wait as long as an hour before they are admitted to the garden, and while they are rarely turned away, some are bound to leave, disappointed but not cross.
The reason for the garden's fame is not solely horticultural. It is a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours even if you are only six years old, or, if older, do not recog- nise a single flower, for it is divided into ten separate enclosures with views and water and rose-red Tudor buildings to diversify the scene. It is cool and calm, a refinement of the surrounding countryside. For others, its attraction is the association with travel and literature. There are terra- cottaits here from Tuscany, bronze urns from agatelle, poplars from Fez, a giant rose from California. And few gardens are better documented. Writers have lived here, visited here, and left a record of what they found, did and admired, starting with the notebooks, letters, diaries and articles of its creators, and continued by Jane Brown, Robin Lane-Fox, Tony Lord and many others .
Another reason for its fame is that the garden is so patently the product of self- taught experiment. There are irremediable errors in the design, like the yew avenue that jinks suddenly at two-thirds of its length, all because I, aged 12, planted a bamboo marker slightly out of alignment. Vita's garden articles never professed infal- libility. 'Try this', she would write. 'It may work. It didn't for me.' Lane-Fox summed it up neatly: 'Like her readers, she saw her- self as an amateur in an endless and sur- prising pursuit', and for him the result is the most beautiful garden in England.
In this week (but what am I doing, enticing more people to come?) you would probably find that claim justified, if you confined your choice to gardens of this kind. There is a sweet disorder about the place, kept in control by Harold's classical paths and vistas and by a team of gardeners who have achieved exactly the right balance between neatness and disarray. The White Garden is the best example of their vigilance. Look across a pool of white flowers to the lead statue of the Virgin standing under a weeping pear that half covers her like tresses. It is Vita's great triumph. She planted it for posterity, and we are that posterity.
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