Sissinghurst, in Kent County, was the home and salvation of the genuine and unconventional marriage between the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and the diplomat Harold Nicolson. There, they discovered together their love for gardening, a passion that held them together for a lifetime despite their well-known extramarital relationships.
After, for the mere fact of being a woman, Vita was forced to give up her inheritance - the imposing family mansion of Knole where she grew up -, the couple bought Sissinghurst in 1930, and on the remains of a series of buildings of Tudor style, they built the home they lived in for more than 30 years, until Vita's death in 1962.
In the garden , organized in different rooms, it was Harold's design, while the plantation was Vita's work. "It was a way to complete his books, as well as the complete left hand to the right while playing the piano," says their son, Nigel Nicolson, in his book Portrait of a Marriage . "The exact perspectives, the careful placement of an urn or a statue, the division of the garden by hedges, walls and buildings in a series of separate gardens or the calculated alternation of straight and curved lines all announce its classical hand," he writes.
Similarly, "the abundance and variety of flowers, clematis, fig trees, vines; the absence of violent colors and of any element that is too tidy or domestic discover their romanticism." That complicit contrast in his way of understanding the garden was also reflected in his marriage.
They maintained what is now known as an open relationship, a practice not very well seen in England in the early twentieth century, but common among a generation of writers known as the Bloomsbury group. The writer and the diplomat were close to this circle of British intellectuals of liberal ideology who rejected Victorian morals and bourgeois habits. And although according to the conventions of the time few would believe this union possible, together they built a solid marriage, founded on love and respect, while both openly maintained parallel homosexual relationships.
The most popular came from Vita, her two great forbidden loves were the writers Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf. Although the first was longer and more intense, the idyll with the author of Mrs. Dalloway or A room of her own has gone down in the history of literature in the pages of her famous work Orlando , inspired by the life of Vita, and thanks to the movie Vita and Virginia (2018). Harold was a lover for years of writer Raymond Mortimer, his wife's friend.
Despite the affair , this free and indestructible marriage in equal parts remained united for 50 years, largely because of the love of gardening that gave them so much joy. "What happiness you and I have received from that garden. A true and deep satisfaction and a feeling of triumph. It is an achievement, sure it is. And it is pleasant to feel that we have created a work of art. Everything really is your merit. Mine were simply rules and pieces of paper, "Harold confessed to his life partner in a 1955 letter.
The Sissinghurst garden, built on a pile of rubble, was his great common project, a work of love and an extravagance in his son's opinion. Every Friday Harold returned home and roamed the garden with his impeccable suit and briefcase. Despite his many occupations, it was his main interest and a rest to relieve the tensions of work. Also "the glass of wine with which the delights of the weekend began," says Nigel Nicolson.
Vita remained alone most of the time. He dedicated the hours to reflect in a large notebook his reflections on the garden. When Harold returned, they shared ideas, "their joys, their worries, their triumphs and disappointments."
The result was a poetic refuge dedicated to beauty that was born mainly from the amateur genius of Vita and that eventually turned her creator into one of the most influential figures of English landscaping of the twentieth century. Between 1946 and 1957, he shaped his gardening adventures in a weekly column of The Observer newspaper. His great work is today owned by the British National Conservation Conservation Organization and is visited by thousands of people a year.
This peculiar and rebellious aristocrat, author of Los Eduardianos , was in many ways a free soul like her admired grandmother, the Malaga dancer Josefa Durán, better known as Pepita de Oliva, the Star of Andalusia. Of gypsy descent, he became famous throughout Europe in the mid-19th century. During his stay in Germany, he fell in love with the English diplomat Lionel Sackville-West. Although they were both married and the huge social differences that separated them, they formed a new family in Arcachon (France).
In Villa Pepita their five children were born, among them Victoria, mother of Vita. Pepita was also the title of the biography that her granddaughter wrote and where, in addition to confessing the influence that her grandmother exerted on her desire for freedom, she claims her mother, repudiated by the conservative Victorian society for being the fruit of an adulterous relationship, and who would end up married to his cousin, the third baron of Sackville-West.
It was in the garden where Vita and Harold found the stability that their busy existence did not give them. Sissinghurst is also a metaphor for the intense common life of both and the formula for the success of their marriage, as their son implies. "The garden is renewed eternally, like a drama, with acts and scenes: there may be changes in the cast, but the script remains the same. Permanence and change are its secret."