Some Flowers - Vita Sackville-West.

Tigridia pavonia is a bulbous flower introduced in Europe from Mexico around the end of the Eighteenth century. In late summer, at the top of firm stems covered with lance-shaped glossy green leaves, single flowers appear in succession. Their beautiful shape, large size and rich bright colours do not go unnoticed.

However, today, they are still as unusual in gardens as they were when Vita Sackville-West included them in her book Some Flowers, a collection of some of her favourite flowers published in 1937. Inspiration came from her own experience at Sissinghurst Castle, where she and her husband, Harold Nicolson, were creating the famous garden around the Elizabethan mansion bought in 1930. By June 1938, the garden would open to the public and she would begin her successful collaboration with several magazines, sharing her knowledge and thoughts about gardening. This collection anticipated the enthusiastic tone and practical content of her future writings.

She addresses Some Flowers to the amateur gardeners, writing an intriguing list of twenty-five plants that can add something special to their cherished gardens. Flowers for all seasons, from Hamamelis mollis to Lilium auratum her choices reveal the interests of a woman who lived the garden all year round. And worked in the garden too. She provides practical information about their cultivation, from exposure to soil preferences, and effective solutions to grow plants with specific needs. She is also attentive to their costs and lavishes advice for their multiplication. This for the gardening side, but Vita Sackville-West was a poet and novelist, she wrote stories, and, in this book, she gives each flower its own story. In just a few sentences, she portrays a group of majestic Fritillaria imperialis in a wild ravine in Persia or the Iris unguicularis picked up in a garden in Italy; she introduces the Dianthus caesius, the Cheddar pink, with the lines of a poem and explores the origins of the name of the lovely Tulipa clusiana, the lady tulip, while for the neglected Gerbera jamesonii, the Transvaal daisy, she imagines a fantastic greenhouse with light blue walls, nymphea, agapanthus and lilies.

The flowers of the tigridia are compared to large butterflies for their vibrant colours and their short life, as coloured insects that stop for a while and then fly away. The rich border with masses of tigridias she imagines would be a wonderful sight, but even the handful of tigridias I found at Sissinghurst this summer, emerging from blue agapanthus and a carpet of sedum, proved extremely succesfull among curious visitors.

She confesses that writing about flowers is not easy task, but she overcomes the problem with her pleasant conversational prose, avoiding a detached scientific language and excessive poetic imagination, using Latin names and technical terms with moderation and limiting the use of adjectives.

Some Flowers is a small book and it was a perfect reading in a rainy Sunday morning in London. Sitting at the window of a cafè, with a frothy small cappuccino in front of me and all the plants I bought early in the morning at the flower market in Columbia Rd already potted, I read with pleasure these portraits of flowers, an open invitation to experiment and to look closer at the flowers we cultivate, not only to understand their effect in a flower-bed but to create a more intimate knowledge, to discover their incredible resources and details, their perfect beauty. Vita Sackville-West suggested to cut the flowers and put them into a vase and then to look at them again and again. For this book, she did not choose those more unusual or expensive but those that a painter would like to paint.

Photos:
Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, August 2014.

Further reading:
Vita Sackville-West, Some Flowers, National Trust, London, 2014.

Link:
Sissinghurst Castle, Biddenden Rd, Cranbrook, Kent.
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst-castle/