Where The Old Roses Grow by Janelle McCulloch (Pimpernel Press £25, 288pp)
Where the Old Roses Grow is available now from the Mail Bookshop
That great human invention of the garden has been regarded in many ways over the centuries: a green and soothing retreat from the din of the world, a sensory riot of colours and scents, even as the Biblical Eden itself.
But how about the exact opposite of that great human invention: war? If a garden is Eden, then war is Hell.
A garden is a place of beauty and life as opposed to ugliness and death, of gently imposed order rather than violent chaos.
Author Janelle McCulloch presents this captivating view via the extraordinary story of Vita Sackville-West and her unorthodox marriage to the diplomat Harold Nicolson.
They were both essentially gay, for one thing. The sheer number of Vita’s lovers is dizzying, including the Duchess of Wellington, Violet Trefusis, Rosamund Grosvenor and Virginia Woolf; and yet she and Harold still managed to have two children together.
In 1930 they bought Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, a ruin at the time, filled with years of accumulated rubbish, including, for reasons unclear, a lot of old toilets and ‘mountains of sardine tins’. Vita said later that it took them three years just to clear out the mess.
Then she set about restoring the garden, especially the rose garden, to its former glory. This was easier said than done, and while Vita may have had impeccable aristocratic ancestry (some of her forebears really did come over with the Conquest), she and Harold were far from wealthy.
They lived without electricity and even running water for a while. Nevertheless, Vita loved it. Poor Harold, though, recalled the day they moved in as the worst day of his life. Indeed he found it so uncomfortable and icily cold that he often stayed at the nearby Bull Inn instead.
Vita did a lot of the outdoor work herself, with the help of a few gardeners, and perhaps boosted by her large intake of sherry. She also became very fond of benzedrine (amphetamine), freely dispensed by doctors in those days.
In full bloom: The White Garden at Sissinghurst Castle
This gave her the zip to keep gardening into the night, by moonlight, telling her husband what ‘fun’ it was. Too poor to buy a wheelbarrow, it seems, for a while they used an old pram instead, and were later helped by a donkey called Abdul.
In time, though, the clouds of war gathered over Europe, and when it finally broke out in 1939, Vita and her beloved Sissinghurst were right in what became known as Hellfire Corner, or Bomb Alley.
The Battle of Britain was fought in the very skies over Sissinghurst, and in those dark and anxious days, Vita was so prepared for the Germans to suddenly appear at the gates ready to ‘brutally occupy the estate’ that she kept a grab bag to flee with, including such essentials as a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and a bodkin.
In 1944 a German bomber crashed in flames just yards from the house, and the fields around were filled with ‘parachutes, bombs and occasionally bodies’. Another time, Vita’s greenhouses were smashed by debris from doodlebugs.
Yet every time, she and her gardeners set about defiantly restoring what had been before.
Battle of Britain: Spitfires fought German Messerschmitts over the gardens at Sissinghurst
There are several other colourful rose-collectors here, or ‘rosarians’ as the author delightfully calls them, often just as eccentric as Vita herself, travelling as far afield as Italy and Sicily to find rare specimens.
It is to these forgotten devotees that we owe many of our old rose varieties today, with their lyrical names like Cerise Bouquet and Honorine de Brabant.
But Vita’s is the central story, and although, as the author herself acknowledges, it has been told many times before, she gives a wholly original and ultimately rather moving view, of roses and horticultural resilience against the very worst that history can throw at us.
