A Rose a Day. No.2

The White Garden, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, UK.

While the world was falling for new-fangled Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses, some rosarians were less than enamoured of their brazenly modern attributes and the kind of garden aesthetic they encouraged, and in the 1930s the British rose-breeder Edward Bunyard inspired Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson to introduce old roses into her garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.

Of course, taste in gardens is mostly subjective, and Sissinghurst Castle is one of my favorites, perhaps mainly because it’s not so far from where I grew up on the Sussex coast so I’ve visited more than once.  The garden is based on the concept of axial walks opening onto enclosed gardens, or "garden rooms".  in the Foreword to her Some Flowers (1937) Vita Sackville-West down a challenge which at the time must have stung many British gardeners:

This country is a country of garden-lovers, and it contains many who, getting perhaps a little bored with growing exactly the same things as their neighbours year after year, look round for a few extras which shall come well within the scope of their purse, time, and knowledge. We can all grow wallflowers, lupins, delphiniums or snapdragons. Far be it from me to run down any of these valuable allies, but the moment always comes when the taste of every true flower-lover turns also towards something less usual and obvious. 

Sissinghurst’s garden is deliberately crammed to the bursting point with plants, but it never quite collapses into chaos. As I mentioned, old garden roses were central to Sackville-West and Nicolson’s vision, and there is a dedicated area for them. They believed the garden’s setting, beside a medieval castle, as Sackville-West wrote, ‘lent itself kindly to their [roses’] untidy, lavish habit; there was space a plenty, with the walls to frame their exuberance’. The intention was therefore to arrange things so that ‘roses may be found growing in a jungle, sprawling, intertwining, barely tamed and foaming in an unorthodox way’. By 1953, there were almost 200 different old garden roses at Sissinghurst, including ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, ‘Complicata’, ‘Camaieux’, ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Belle de Crécy’, ‘Variegata di Bologna’, and ‘Paul Ricault’.

In Some Flowers, Sackville-West discusses 5 roses, all ‘old’: ‘Tuscany’, Rosa moyesii (a native of China that at that time was rare in England), Rosa centifolia nuscosa (the Moss Rose), and Rosa mundi. ‘Tuscany’, a very dark red Gallica Rose, which is also known as the Velvet Rose. Of this rose Sackville-West wrote:

What combination of words! One almost suffocates in their soft depths, as though one sank into a bed of rose-petals, all thorns ideally stripped away. We cannot actually lie on a bed of roses, unless we are decadent and also very rich, but metaphorically we can imagine ourselves doing so when we hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it in an intimate way into our private heart. This sounds a fanciful way of writing, the sort of way which makes me shut up most gardening books with a bang, but in this case I am trying to get as close to my true meaning as possible. It really does teach one something, to look long and closely at a rose, especially such a rose as Tuscany, which opens flat (being semi-double) thus revealing the quivering and dusty gold of its central perfection.

Sackville-West doesn’t mention Sissinghurst’s most famous feature, the White Garden, in Some Flowers for the simple reason that it wasn’t until the 1950s that she began to plant it into existence. The idea was that only white, green, grey and silver were to grow there. By choosing a pale palette, Sackville-West was uniting flora that usually do not find themselves neighbours, and pride of place is a white species rose, the climberRosa mulliganii. But the rose I remember best at Sissinghurst is the one growing on the south face of the South Cottage, which you can see in the photograph – the Noisette climber ‘Mme. Alfred Carriére’ – which, asI later discovered, is the very first rose Sackville-West planted in the garden after she purchased the property. Inspired by this encounter, I planted my own ‘Mme. Alfred Carriére’, which today climbs up the east facing wall (it can tolerate shade)of our house in France. We’ve nicknamed it the ‘Curious Rose’, because it is so prolific it keeps reaching high enough to conceal the view out our back window, obliging us to prune it back on a regular basis.