- 1 Unsigned letter to Vita Sackville-West (20/02/1951) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening Literature a (...)
1Astounded by the numerous letters Vita Sackville-West would receive each week from readers responding to her horticultural columns published in The Observer, Sackville-West’s editor praised her in a 1951 letter, telling her: ‘you’re a public benefactor’.1 Interestingly enough, Sackville-West’s horticultural pieces have been largely neglected by critics, who tend to focus on her garden at Sissinghurst, Kent (Richardson), or on her love affair with Virginia Woolf (Sproles). Sackville-West also tends to be perceived as an aristocratic writer, critics thus reading her work through the prisms of tradition and lineage (Blanch, Edwards). As such, transmission in her work appears to be related to one’s bloodline, inheritance, and social status.
2Yet, I would like to approach Sackville-West through another angle, by focusing on her interest in horticulture and gardening. Sackville-West wrote extremely popular botanical articles for The Observer from 1946 to 1961. She also broadcast chronicles for the BBC at times, and thus had a large audience of garden lovers, be they amateurs or professionals. At any rate, she was intent on sharing pieces of advice regarding gardening, as well as experiments she would try out in her own garden. Thus, horticultural transmission for Sackville-West equates transferring knowledge and craft, as well as circulating and communicating her garden philosophy beyond the space of Sissinghurst.
3Drawing on these botanical articles, I wish to highlight how Sackville-West circulates her own ‘gardening philosophy’ through the press, while attempting to establish her ‘territory’ compared to other gardening correspondents. Transmitting botanical knowledge stems from her own experiments, which she always shares with a humble approach. Embracing the posture of the amateur, she appears to be bent on reaching out to anyone interested in botany, regardless of their social class. Ultimately, I intend to underline how Sackville-West seeds networks of transmission and knowledge through her chronicles as she often reaches out to readers who engage with her papers and graft their knowledge on her claims. In this perspective, I posit that her chronicles become entangled in rhizomatic proliferations.
4When she started writing botanical pieces for The Observer in 1946, Sackville-West was not an obscure garden lover: she was already renowned for tending Sissinghurst, which she had acquired in 1930 with her husband Harold Nicolson. She had also published several poems in which she evoked green matters: her georgic poem The Land was awarded the Hawthornden prize in 1927, a year after its first publication. Yet, Sackville-West’s words of advice in The Observer depart from her poetical take on landscape and gardens. Sackville-West was indeed bent on sharing a gardening philosophy based on practicality rather than poetic artistry. This emphasis on practicality is for instance stated in one of her chronicles in which she distances herself from gardening books and theory:
The gardening books, also, will tell you to renew your plants every three years. They may be right. All I can say is that my own plants have been in my garden for over twelve years and show no sign of going off; they crop as well as ever and have received little attention, so on this point I must disagree with the gardening books. Practical experience is worth more than many pages of print (Sackville-West 1951, 100)
5Going against the grain of elaborate gardening manuals, she puts forward accessibility: ‘As a rule I try to be practical in these articles, recommending only such plants as can be grown with some hope of success by the amateur gardener having no advantage of glass or any similar luxury’ (Sackville-West 1953, 16). Advocating accessibility, she also shares pieces of advice to accommodate with austerity measures, as pointed out by Rebecca Nagel who grounds some of The Observer chronicles in the context of rationing, and picks up on how Sackville-West suggests ‘ways of increasing the numbers of bulbs for the garden’ or on how she ‘recommends slow-growing and labor-intensive plants’ (Nagel 24–25). Sackville-West’s approach is furthermore hands-on as she does not confine herself to the realm of ‘noble’ flowers: she also discusses slugs, snails and birds, for instance. Evoking ‘helpful hints’ rather than pointing to ‘ingenious and alluring’ gadgets (Sackville-West 1953, 122), she shares practical tips with avid readers, enjoining them to get their hands in the dirt. As such, the garden does not read as a poetical space, but rather a site of toil, labour and struggle in which one has to fight various pests. These pieces of advice stem from personal experience, as Sackville-West opens up on her attempts at Sissinghurst:
After struggling for years to induce Daphne mezereum to thrive in my garden, I have at last achieved a miserable degree of success by planting it in a mixture of a leaf-mould and sand, in the broken shade of some trees of Kentish cob-nuts. This is the treatment I would recommend: a spongy soil with overhead shade in summer. (Sackville-West 1953, 99)
6Terms such as ‘struggling’, ‘achieved’, ‘degree of success’ reveal her vision of gardening as moments of trial and error. Although Sackville-West is intent on sharing the knowledge she has acquired over the years by testing and experimenting with various designs and planting patterns in Sissinghurst, she also frequently reminds her readers of the limits of her savviness. She makes a point of asserting herself as a ‘country gardener’ and refuses to step into the private turf of town gardeners: ‘I don’t know anything about town gardening; I have never had any experience of it; I am a country gardener not a town gardener; and if one values one’s integrity in such matters one cannot pretend to a knowledge one does not possess. Sorry; but there it is’ (Sackville-West 1953, 58). As such, her conception of transmission is deontological as she claims ‘integrity’ and draws a distinction between town and countryside gardeners who operate on different grounds with diverse methods and tools. Ultimately, she links her experience to creativity and experimentation: ‘The fun of gardening is nothing unless you take reckless risks’ (Sackville-West 1951, 133). The gardening principle she asserts here is furthermore echoed in her poem The Garden in which the persona claims: ‘let invention riot’ (Sackville-West 1946, 111). The mention of the verb ‘riot’ is revelatory of her creative gardening method arched around motion, grandeur, and colours. The term started being used as early as the 16th century to signify to ‘act or move without control or restraint’. It was then employed in the 19th century to refer to a ‘vivid display of colours’, and was ultimately adopted in early 20th century to stress the spectacularity of something (Harper). These various meanings all apply to Sackville-West’s conception of gardening, which reads as a bold philosophy fuelled by creativity, experimentation, and abundance. Her vision in Sissinghurst is often said to be ‘romantic’ as underlined by her son Nigel Nicolson comparing his parents’ gardening sensibilities:
The garden became, inevitably, a reflection of its makers. The received idea is that it was a marriage of sensibilities: a certain classical elegance and even austerity in the planning by Harold; a rich and romantic profusion in the planting, mostly by Vita, what she called the ‘cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny’ method, the verve of ‘exaggeration, big groups, big masses’. All that is true, even if not in quite so schematic a way. Often it was Vita who advocated a simplicity and straightforwardness in design; often it was Harold who wanted a more baroque and theatrical effect. (Nicolson 1992, 270)
7This romantic profusion is clearly asserted in a chronicle: ‘My liking for gardens to be lavish is an inherent part of my garden philosophy. I like generosity whenever I find it, whether in gardens or elsewhere. I hate to see things scrimp and scrubby’ (Sackville-West 1951, 49). Such generosity is visible in her chronicles when she disavows herbaceous borders for instance:
It is quite true that I have no great love for herbaceous borders or for the plants that usually fill them—coarse things with no delicacy or quality about them. . . . The alternative is a border largely compose of flowering shrubs, including the big bush roses; but for those who still desire a mixed border it is possible to design one which will (more or less) look after itself once it has become established. (Sackville-West 1953, 132)
8It also reverberates in her poem The Garden as she interlaces flower names, colours and textures, the poem reading as a mixed border of sort as the gardener skims through seed catalogues and envisions his future garden:
He dreams an orchard neatly pruned and spurred,
Where Cox’ Orange jewels with the red
Of Worcester Permain, and the grass beneath
Blows with narcissus and the motley crocus,
Rich as Crivelli, fresh as Angelo
Poliziano, or our English Chaucer
Or Joachim du Bellay, turn by turn.
He dreams again, extravagant, excessive,
Of planted acres most unorthodox
Where Scarlet Oaks would flush our English fields.
With passionate colour as the Autumn came,
Quercus coccinea, that torch of flame
Blown sideways as by some Atlantic squall
Between its native north America
And this our moderate island.
(Sackville-West 1946, 26 27)
- 2 For further details on the distinction between in situ and in visu see: Roger 22–23.
9Here, the isotopy of colour (‘orange’, ‘red’, ‘motley’, ‘scarlet’, ‘flush’, ‘colour’, ‘torch of flame’) and the intertextual reference to Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli give a pictorial quality to Sackville-West’s lines. This pictorial dimension is all the more asserted by adjectives (‘rich’, ‘fresh’, ‘passionate’) and verbs (‘blows’, ‘flush’, ‘blown’) which add movement and dynamism to the imaginary orchard in which the scene unfolds. Be they in situ at Sissinghurst, or in visu2 in her literary and horticultural work, her compositions are oftentimes painterly, echoing Gertrude Jekyll’s Arts and Crafts mixed borders in which colours are intermingled, as Jekyll claimed that: ‘. . . planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank within the bounds of the fine arts, so that I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity’ (Jekyll 1899, 156–157). This painterly approach to gardening is further developed by Jekyll on her study of colour scheme in a flower garden:
Each portion now becomes a picture in itself, and every one is such a colouring that it best prepares the eye, in accordance with natural law, for what is to follow. Standing for a few moments before the endmost region of grey and blue, and saturating the eye to its utmost capacity with these colours, it passes with extraordinary avidity to the succeeding yellows. These intermingle in a pleasant harmony with the reds and scarlets, blood-reds and clarets, and then lead again to yellows. Now the eye has again become saturated, this time with the rich colouring, and has therefore, by the law of complementary colour, acquired a strong appetite for the greys and purples. (Jekyll 1911, 52)
- 3 I expand on Arts and Crafts influences on Sissinghurst in Laburthe-tolra, Clémence, ‘From Elizabeth (...)
10The garden becomes here a matter of composition: flowers are arranged into ‘a picture’, with colours strategically placed so as to call one’s attention. Sackville-West’s gardening philosophy is greatly inspired by the colour arrangement presented by Jekyll: she evokes in chronicles how she mixes flowers so as to have some colours and textures at the back which will make the plants in the foreground pop out (Scott-James 84–86). Her white garden in Sissinghurst is the epitome of this composition: plants with green or silvery foliage are carefully selected so as to weave in various shades of white. Her mixing flowers is also inherited from William Robinson and his wild garden theory, as Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith note that ‘Sackville-West followed William Robinson’s advice to lace roses and other climbers through trees, a signature look of the orchard at Sissinghurst’ (Page and Smith 218). Not only does Sackville-West incorporate Jekyll’s and Robinson’s garden aesthetics in Sissinghurst, but she also aligns herself with the Arts and Craft aesthetics as theorised by William Morris and his sympathisers. The latter envisioned house and garden as a whole, as best encapsulated by German architect Hermann Muthesius who summed up: ‘garden, house, and interior—a unity’ (Tankard 218). Sackville-West adopts this vision in the very layout of Sissinghurst, which she describes as ‘a combination of long axial walks, running north and south, east and west, usually with terminal points such as a statue or an archway or a pair of sentinel poplars, and the more intimate surprise of small geometrical gardens opening off them, rather as the rooms of an enormous house would open off the arterial corridors’ (Sackville-West 1953, 403). Strolling across Sissinghurst, the visitor gets indeed to walk into garden rooms as diverse as ‘the white garden’, ‘the herb garden’, ‘the orchard’, or the rose garden in the ‘rondel’, to name but a few rooms designed in Sissinghurst. In duplicating this Arts and Craft design onto Sissinghurst,3 Sackville-West joins a gardening lineage characterised by creativity, opulence, and informality, as shaped by Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson, and William Morris among others, who are all often referred to in her chronicles for The Observer.
11Ultimately, such compositions reveal Sackville-West’s imaginative process, as she draws a parallel between gardener and poet, seed catalogues reading like poems in the sense that both call for the imagination and for creation. Reading her chronicles, one thus moves from the page to the ground, as imaginary gardens surge on the page. This led Sackville-West however to be accused of being ‘an armchair, library fireside garden’ (Lane Fox 12). Having her legitimacy called into question, Sackville-West fought back: ‘May I assure him that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger-nails and sometimes my heart in practical pursuit of my favourite occupation?’ (Lane Fox 57). Although her tone is rather confident in her articles, her letters with editors show a constant fight for recognition. In fact, Sackville-West constantly aimed to claim her territory. While several horticultural colleges opened for women at the turn of the 20th century (Bilston; Opitz), leading to the professionalisation of women gardeners, it is interesting to note that Sackville-West always refers to the gardener as a man in her work, be it in her chronicles or in her poems. Perhaps this can be read as a way to appeal and to transmit her knowledge to a broader audience without being taxed of being ‘a writer for women’, as argued by Susan Bazargan:
In her symbolic act of taking possession of the land in her reconstruction of the Kentish weald, Sackville-West claims her cultural/ancestral territory, denied to her because of her sex; in aligning herself with Virgil, she also deftly positions herself in the male canonical literary history of the West but ironically at the cost of denying her own subjectivity, or at best ‘cross(ing) . . . doublecross(ing) that “I” in order to move from silence to self-narrative’ (Smith 3–4). (Bazargan 31)
- 4 Letter from Vita Sackville-West to N. Rose (24/02/1958) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening Literatu (...)
12One may then wonder why she decided to circulate her gardening with the press. One reason is, of course, to share her horticultural experiments, as well as to comfort herself with gardening, as observed by her biographer Dennison: ‘As in all Vita’s writing, she herself was among her beneficiaries: in her Observer columns she held at bay her fears that she would be prevented from gardening by physical incapacity’ (Dennison 280). Another reason is to earn additional money to buy more flowers, pay staff, and manage Sissinghurst overall. This is made manifest in a 1958 letter she sends to The Observer following her husband’s advice that she ‘should put [her] price’.4 She indeed explains that she ‘hate[s] bargaining’ but that the weekly £10 cheque she receives from The Observer only covers the wages of her two gardeners, but is insufficient when it comes to income tax and sur-tax. Last but not least, these chronicles also constituted constant advertising for Sissinghurst when it was open to the public from 1938 onwards. Her articles turned out extremely popular to the point that
the columns she wrote for The Observer won her renewed and long-lasting popularity and acclaim of a different variety; she was photographed by Beaton, Hedgecoe, Snowdon. They also garnered an impressive mailbag—in excess of two thousand letters one bumper week; Vita replied to them all. (Dennison 279)
- 5 Letter from Mr Kilmartin to Vita Sackville-West (18/03/1958) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening Lit (...)
- 6 Letter from Mr Kilmartin to Vita Sackville-West (24/04/1958) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening Lit (...)
13And yet, Sackville-West felt threatened by other chroniclers: she wrote several times to her editor to complain about other gardening correspondents who impinged on her topics. Her editor tried to reassure her that there was no ‘danger of overlapping’5, and that one would ‘poach on (her) territory’.6 Writing for The Observer, she thus wished to assert herself as a horticultural columnist and gardener rather than a poet, such chronicles reading as ‘tokens of official recognition’ (Dennison 282).
14At any rate, this fight for recognition never transpires in her chronicles, where she embraces the posture of the amateur, as opposed to the professional. One of her letters to her husband stresses how out of place she felt when deemed an expert:
Two years earlier, at an RHS dinner at the Society’s headquarters in Vincent Square, Vita had told Harold: ‘I was made rather a fuss of; they made me speak—but you know, Hadji, I don’t like it; I hate getting credit for the wrong things; and I felt that there I was, an amateur amongst real experts; and all because of my thin little Observer articles I had an undeserved reputation; and also because a lot of people in . . . the audience had been to the garden here. I felt a fraud.’ (Dennison 282)
15Her tone is always conversational in her chronicles, as she directly addresses the reader and identifies with the latter, including herself in the community of garden lovers and amateurs. As an amateur, her tone also proves to be didactic as she gives pieces of advice, highlighting how gardening is both labour and leisure. A running thread in her articles is therefore the emphasis on the pleasure of gardening one may experience. Part of this pleasure is evoked through puns and ‘plant jokes’ as she calls them (Sackville-West 1953, 32–33). With voicing her experiments, her chronicles reflect a constant work in progress as Sackville-West shares her successes as well as failures. The genuine vulnerability she sometimes reveals reinforces the sense of intimacy readers felt with her conversational tone. Vulnerable, she confesses her frustration at times: ‘There are some moments when I feel pleased with my garden, and other moments when I despair. The pleased moments usually happen in spring, and last up to the middle of June.’ (Sackville-West 1951, 88). The repetition of ‘moments’ introduces a reflection on time and contingency, showing how gardening is also a lesson of humility, in which one has to depend on the weather or the proliferation of plants, for instance.
16This need to tune in reveals a humble tone as well as ethical thinking on the part of Sackville-West. She notably extends her vulnerability to readers by asking them at times for advice:
Several correspondents have asked me to say something about that strangely coloured black and green flower commonly called Iris tuberosa, or the Snakeshead iris, which is to be found in florists’ shops during March and April, sold in bunches, rather cheap. I like being asked these questions, because they come as a challenge to my own failures in gardening and make me examine my conscience to see where I have gone wrong. (Sackville-West 1951, 47)
17Engaging with readers leads Sackville-West to conduct more investigations on plants so as to improve her knowledge. Her efforts are notably revealed by the lexical field of self-examination she uses (‘challenge’, ‘failures,’ ‘examine my conscience’, ‘gone wrong’) when acknowledging her own mistakes:
I have been getting myself into trouble, and must put it right. Writing about quinces, I said that they were not liable to disease, so far as I knew. By that cautious title phrase I hoped to safeguard myself, and indeed my own experience of quince trees and all the books I consulted endorsed my opinion. It now appears that I was wrong. It appears that they are occasionally liable in wet summers to ‘a fungus rejoicing in the name of Entomosporium maculatum,’ which attacks both the foliage and the fruit; also to brown rot, which attacks the leaves and fruit of both the quince and the medlar. (Sackville-West 1951, 140)
18In her attempt to correct her previous assertion, she lists facts through the use of the present tense and its value of general truth, while also employing the isotopy of morality (‘trouble’, ‘put it right’, ‘safeguard myself’) to reassert her integrity. This leads her to stress her position as an amateur sharing ‘[her] own experience’, constantly learning thanks to her readers.
19Her humility also shows in her way of turning something deemed a ‘weak’ subject into a noble one. One example of this would be her evocation of the foliage of roses, which seems an unexpected subject, rather ‘pedestrian’ compared to noble roses:
There are certain roses whose charm lies in their foliage as much as in their flowers. They are the roses whose foliage one can describe only by calling it fern-like; and by that I do not mean the ferns of woodland or damp places, but the so-called Maidenhair fern which used to be grown in company of smilax for the decoration of dinner tables at public banquets, and perhaps, for all I know, still is. (Sackville-West 1953, 24–25)
20The same goes for her treatment of herbs: ‘This is not the first time I have written about herbs, and no doubt it will not be the last. My own small herb-garden is always encouragingly popular, with men as well as with the sentimentalists whom I know fatally in advance are going to say that it is full of old-world charm.’ (Sackville-West 1951, 102). Mentioning herbs and her herb garden at Sissinghurst, Sackville-West inserts herself in a post-war movement analysed by Alicia Carroll as a ‘modern herbal revival in England’ led by women who ‘transformed public perception of local herbs from “almost inert” weeds to potent partners in both domestic and commercial gardens’ (Carroll 152). Commenting on the layout of Sissinghurst, Tony Lord adds:
Vita was fascinated by herbs, their wealth of history, folklore and fragrance. But to incorporate them with other planting risked overwhelming their quiet charms among showier neighbours. By planting them together in this strangely far-flung formal outpost of the garden, she created an enclave where the romance of herbs, their associations, literary, historical, medical and culinary, and their beauty and scent, could be enjoyed. (Lord 110)
21By focusing on herbs, Sackville-West therefore calls for decentring one’s gaze from the ‘expected’ key flowers of the ornamental garden. Gardening thus becomes a matter of not only tending the garden, but also caring for the plant, as Sackville-West acknowledges plants’ needs within the ornamental garden. The wellness of plants is sought for and gardening is thus not only perceived as an artistic gesture, but rather as a means to transmit an ethical perception of green matters. It is also important to note however that Sackville-West is at times ambiguous: she sometimes compares plants to children, or endows plants with idiosyncrasies. Her anthropomorphism can be likened to the one asserted by Jane Bennett in her reflection on agency as Bennett claims: ‘We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism—the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature—to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world’ (Bennett xvi).
22Ultimately, Sackville-West’s ethical vision also materialises through a democratic gesture which consists in opening out the garden. For one, Sackville-West opens out gardening to all social classes, claiming: ‘Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth. It is a question of love, taste, and knowledge’ (Sackville-West 1951, 44). She notably suggests gardening layouts for small gardens, be they ‘a bungalow garden, or a council-house garden, or the garden round an old cottage, or the garden round a new house or a mainbus route’ (Sackville-West 1951, 45). For the ones who do not own a garden, she offers alternatives such as gardening in ‘tubs’ (Sackville-West 1951, 155) or ‘window-boxes’ as advocated by Xenia Field, a town gardener more experienced than her on the topic. Interestingly enough, Sackville-West also refers to ‘her garden’ without ever naming Sissinghurst in her chronicles, being ‘careful not to forgo the inclusive quality of her advice’, as noted by Dennison (Dennison 280). What is more, Sackville-West also welcomes in garden lovers in Sissinghurst, sharing her private amateur garden. Sissinghurst becomes then both private and public, for visitors to walk through and for readers to discover through articles. In doing so, she revisits the 18th–century tradition of aristocrats opening their gardens to visitors. A small fee was to pay upon entrance, for charity:
Vita and Harold decided in 1938 to open the garden under the National Gardens Scheme, for just two days a year. A couple of years later they increased this to daily opening (in the main growing season) and charged a shilling entrance fee, with an honesty bowl left under the arch.
Vita liked the garden being open. Visitors—‘the Shillingses’, as she called them—often, particularly towards the end of the day, reported seeing her weeding or planting, when she would be happy to have a chat and answer questions on plant names and show them her favourites, flowering at that moment. (Raven 348–349)
23This opening out epitomises Sackville-West’s perception of the garden as a space to learn from: ‘One learns a lot from visiting other people’s gardens. One gets ideas. I got a lot of ideas from a famous garden I visited recently; so many, that I feel like a wine-glass spilling over: so many, that I cannot compress them all into this short article’ (Sackville-West 1951, 6).
24If one is to learn things from visiting other individuals’ gardens, the same applies to Sackville-West and her botanical chronicles. Addressing her readers, Sackville-West looks for interaction rather than one-sided transmission. In the way various exchanges occur between the chronicler and her readers (be they amateurs or professionals such as nurserymen or presidents of horticultural societies), I contend that Sackville-West’s horticultural pieces are entangled in rhizomatic proliferations. In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a subterranean stem which enables plants to store nutrients, and to survive harsh seasons. In their philosophical reading of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari note that the latter propagates itself horizontally and does not have a centre, contrary to the root or the tree which grow vertically and are associated to hierarchy (Deleuze and Guattari 6). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the rhizome rests on several principles which are ‘connection’, ‘heterogeneity’, ‘multiplicity’, ‘asignifying rupture’, ‘cartography’, and ‘decalcomania’ (Deleuze and Guattari 7–12). Arguing that ‘any point of the rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the ever-changing quality of the rhizome, which ‘evolves by subterranean stems and flows’ (Deleuze and Guattari 7). This aspect is particularly evidenced in the way readers engaged with Sackville-West’s chronicles, especially when she sought advice from them and asked for instance:
For once, instead of giving advice, may I ask for it? How does one protect the choicer sorts of primroses from the attack of sparrows? Has any reader of these articles a sovereign remedy against this naughty, wanton, wild destruction? Short of putting automatic cartridges amongst my primroses I have done everything I can think of. (Sackville-West 1951, 52)
- 7 Letter from G. O. Nickalls to Vita Sackville-West (11/11/1957) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening L (...)
- 8 Letter from Vita Sackville-West to Mr. Rose (04/10/1951) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening Literat (...)
25By reaching out to her readership, Sackville-West fosters a sense of community and reciprocity which materialises in the mail she would receive from readers: she was not only sent answers, but also recommendations as well as seeds, gardening books7 and various objects, such as a gardening belt made for her by one of her readers.8
26Opening her garden to visitors also leads Sackville-West to reach out to other garden lovers. Adam Nicolson points out: ‘Vita was in the habit of digging up the odd plant while a visitor was with her and offering it to them, leaving a hole in the flower beds’ (Nicolson 2009, 277). Although Nicolson’s remark sounds quite anecdotal, it reveals Sackville-West’s need for ‘multiplicity’: welcoming in garden amateurs is not only an opportunity to discuss her planting and gardening, but it also leads her to decentre her gaze from the perspective of her ornamental garden.
- 9 Letter from J. A. Boul to Vita Sackville-West (22/05/1957) in Sackville-West, Vita, Gardening Liter (...)
27Consequently, the rhizomatic proliferations made manifest by mail sent or visits paid to Sissinghurst led Sackville-West’s community of amateurs to graft knowledge, since ‘to write is to graft’, as posited by Derrida (Derrida 355). Commenting on the etymology of the term, Marder highlights the extent to which a graft is an inscription: ‘derived from the Greek verb graphein—“to write”—it predisposes us to view the relation between the host and the transplant in terms of the substratum for an inscription and that which is written on it’ (Marder 16). By suggesting references, ideas, and sometimes counter-arguments to Sackville-West and reacting to her claims, readers inscribed, planted, and transplanted novel ideas on the original inscriptions made by the chronicler. As such, botanical transmission turns out to be in constant evolution and exemplifies the very process of grafting defined by Marder as ‘two kinds of thinking to blossom or come to fruition together, on the same trunk/body/corpus’ (Marder 17). This coming together is notably made manifest in a letter sent by Mrs J. A. Boul, who picks up on one of Sackville-West’s chronicles on the Spurge Family (Euphorbia), and joins in to give her experience with this plant: ‘it may interest you to know of an experience that I had several years ago with these plants’. Not only does this reader expand on the rash she had due to the poison secreted by this plant, but she also recommends Sackville-West a book that addresses the danger caused by these plants. She concludes: ‘I am really not in the habit of writing letters like this but I did think you might be interested’.9 By sharing her experience and recommending a work on the poison she evokes, and which Sackville-West seemed to be unaware of, the reader illustrates the ‘principle of cartography and decalcomania’ which is typical of the rhizome according to Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, she fosters new connections unobserved by Sackville-West, and therefore contributes to shaping a new map of horticultural knowledge.
- 10 She also mentions petunias sent by nuns based in Toulon, France. See Sackville-West 1951, 31.
28More literally speaking, forms of transmissions are also mapped out on local and global scales, and rooted in various cultural, historical, and geographical contexts. Sackville-West often received letters from British citizens or gifts from friends coming back to England after travelling, transmitting her pieces of information they would have discovered abroad.10 She recalls for instance a seed of Ipomea Bonea-Nox brought back from India by one of her friends:
The seed of a very special form of Ipomea was given to me by my friend, Mr. Noel Sutton. What a gift! He had got it from India, and it was called Ipomea Bona-Nox. It flowered only at night; so you had to sit up with it if you wanted to catch it in flower. It might have been carved out of the thinnest flakes of ivory.
(Sackville-West 1951, 33)
29Sackville-West’s enthusiasm over the plant is here suffused with orientalism and does not seem to take into account the potential destructive dimension of collecting seeds from their ecosystems. Nor does she reflect on the consequences of transplanting these seeds and making them grow in climates to which they are not acclimatised. Transmission becomes tinged with imperial undertones, echoing 18th–century naturalists’ expeditions which were motivated by the desire to identify foreign species and bring back the latter to botanical gardens which would become ‘theatres in which exotic nature was, literally, put in its place in a European system’ (Drayton 183). The intersection of natural history and imperialism is thus visible in Sackville-West’s habit of bringing back specimens from the countries she visited, as she argued: ‘there is a peculiar pleasure in bringing home plants which one has collected oneself in distant countries. Quite possibly that pleasure may plunge its roots in the fertile soil of vanity’ (Sackville-West 1987, 49). Transmission operates on several levels: Sackville-West either brings back plants from abroad, and then transplants them in Sissinghurst or expands on them in essays. In doing so, she re-enacts 18th–century imperial practices, and brings ‘flower[s] hitherto unknown to European eyes’ (Sackville-West 1937, 83) by uprooting them from their original locale. This transplanting as transmission raises however questions as to ‘who owns nature’, as asked by Londa Schiebinger in her study on plants and empire (Schiebinger 44). Picking up on Sackville-West’s travels to Persia and the Iris reticulata she brings all the way back from Persia to Sissinghurst, Bazarguan highlights the colonial implications of Sackville-West’s botany:
But the colony of flowers, transplanted in English soil, a microcosm of the idyllic, pastoral vision of the Persia Sackville-West loved, are also ‘alien(s)’ (50), aesthetic in their main purpose, yet overdetermined symbols in their multiple political and cultural resonances. Signs of Persia, but acquired through colonial prerogatives, they signify the crossing, the interdependence of the English countryside and the British empire. (Bazargan 47)
30Seemingly unaware of the political, imperial dimension of transplanting plants, Sackville-West appears to be motivated by the idea of circulating pieces of information to her readers and visitors. This is notably visible in her essay Some Flowers, where she expands on the Fritillaria imperialis she saw in Persia:
But somehow that Persian ravine has spoiled me for the more sophisticated interpretation which I used to associate with the crown imperial. Somehow I can no longer think of them solely as the flowers one sees growing along the bottom of a mediaeval tapestry. I think of them as the imperial wildlings I found by chance in a dark ravine in their native hills.
(Sackville-West 1937, 32)
- 11 This conservative aspect of her writing is however much more prevalent in her poetical work, such a (...)
31Here, the plant is no longer just perceived from an aesthetic point of view although Sackville-West seems to indulge in the ‘lingering romance of discovery’ which characterised 18th–century botanical narratives (Batsaki, Burke Cahalan and Tchikine 9). Rather, Sackville-West shares an ecological perspective by expanding on the plant and the ecosystem it thrives in (‘a dark ravine’, ‘native hills’, ‘Persian ravine’). Transmission becomes ambivalent: passing on to her readers knowledge acquired abroad in situ, Sackville-West shares her first-hand experience of a plant few readers would ever encounter. She also uproots plants during her travels, propagating them to other continents, but also potentially destroying the ecosystems these plants originate from. In doing so, she reactivates 18th–century practices when ‘natural history extracted specimens not only from their organic or ecological relations with each other, but also from their places in other peoples’ economies, histories, social and symbolic systems’ (Pratt 31). Her vision of transmission seems, however, ecological at times as she ponders over ecosystems and shares information on plants’ needs so as to educate readers on these matters.11
32Although Sackville-West’s chronicles proved to be widely popular from 1946 to 1961 when they were published, they have been rather neglected by critics, who tend to focus on other aspects of her work, or on her links with the Bloomsbury Group. This paper stems from a research trip dating back to June 2022, when I had the privilege to have access to Sackville-West’s archives at the Guardian, as well as in Sissinghurst. While her chronicles have been compiled into four collections, her letters with garden lovers remain unpublished. Shedding light on this archival material, this paper thus reads as an attempt to celebrate Sackville-West’s love for gardening as an amateur as well as her passion for learning from others, as she claims that ‘nothing could be more useful to the amateur gardener than to observe other people’s ideas, other people’s successes, and other people’s failures’ (Sackville-West 1951, 72). Far from being unilateral, horticultural transmission is therefore interactive as Sackville-West reaches out to a large community through the press, always asserting herself as a country garden amateur rather than a fixed figure of authority. Transmission thus operates on horizontal levels with readers grafting their knowledge on the chronicler’s experience, her columns therefore proliferating in ways similar to rhizomatic networks.
- 12 David Cannadine casts a different light on Sackville-West’s personality and lifestyle, which he rea (...)
33Rather than being ‘a public benefactor’, as pointed out by her editor, Sackville-West appears to be a mediator, positioning herself as a relay of information and engaging with a wide community of garden lovers, be they established figures or not. This in-between stance is best encapsulated by her desire to write for readers of all social classes and to open out her garden to visitors.12 In doing so, she means to democratise gardening despite coming from an aristocratic family whose wealth and grandeur passed down from generation to generation is symbolised by Knole house, her childhood house with a vast deer park and gardens.
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