Roses

Each week, Cathy at Rambling in the Garden hosts In a Vase on Monday and encourages fellow bloggers to find something in their gardens to photograph and write about. It’s such a lovely thing to do on a Monday morning that I try to take part every week. Some weeks, it’s just not possible due to lack of time but whenever I can squeeze it in, it’s a prompt to get out into the garden and find something, anything, to stick in a vase. December can be tricky but June is not. June is when there is abundance in my garden and when I’m in the happy situation of being spoilt for choice.

I’ve grown increasingly fond of roses in recent years. I used to think they were fussy and over-the-top and too much like hard work to keep happy but I’ve come round to them. I mean, what’s not to love about layers of silken petals in delicate shades of pink, say, that smell delicious?! Our latest addition to the rose tribe in our garden is ‘The Generous Gardener’ and I snipped two blooms off it this morning (the two palest pink ones). They were heading in the wrong direction so can be spared for the vase. The other two roses are unknown varieties – they were overgrown in the garden when we moved here. The brighter pink one, in bud in the centre of the first photo, is from a rose growing at the base of a pillar in the windiest spot in the garden. We cut it right back to its base last year to paint the pillar but it’s come back brilliantly. The two darker pink roses are from an old climber at the base of the back garden wall that was also cut back to renovate it – the flowers smell amazing.

Joining the roses are Geum ‘Blazing Sunset’, a couple of pink scented pelargonium flowers, Salvia ‘Hot Lips’ (from a plant that was moved, trimmed and has come back mostly red, which I prefer), Linaria, one Heuchera flower stem and a couple of leaves, copper beech leaves, a stem of mint, a lovely snapdragon, and really tall Briza (which has seeded everywhere, thank you Cathy!).

You can see from the photos that the light is pretty low today. It’s been overcast and dull all day after a sunny summery day yesterday but that’s perhaps fitting as it’s back to school for everyone here and all the teenagers had exams. History GCSE for the younger son, Psychology A-level for the elder and Science, Spanish and RE end-of-year exams for my daughter. It’ll all be over quickly for her this week, and all over for the other two by 19th June, thank goodness. They’re all home now, tired, hungry and a little shell-shocked so I’m off to make a cake. I know we’re all meant to be reducing our sugar intake these days but sometimes a large slice of cake is just what you need.

Whether you’re taking exams, baking for exam-takers, working hard or holidaying, I hope you have a thoroughly good week.

My mind is brimming with ideas this morning, laying down snapshots and processing happy memories of a glorious, flower-filled garden visit.

We first visited Sissinghurst in the early 2000s before our daughter was born. With two energetic toddlers in tow, we were more focused on keeping them on the paths and not straying too far from the toilets than admiring the glorious gardens and surroundings. I had clocked that it was a place of beauty, though, and we have some very lovely photos of the boys in the meadow. Despite now living only an hour’s drive away, it wasn’t until yesterday that we finally made the time to go there again, this time without any children – none of them could be persuaded to tear themselves away from their computing devices (oh yes, revision). ‘It’s ok, mum, you go on your own. We’ll be fine…’ ‘Well, ok then. If you’re sure.’ And we hotfooted it out of the door. How times change.

Anyway, back to Sissinghurst Castle Garden. The place has a fascinating history: it was used as a prison for 3000 French soldiers captured during the Seven Years War (1756–63); it was a poor-house in the late 1700s; and it was a fine example of Victorian farming during the mid-1800s when it was owned by the Cornwallis family. Poet and writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson bought it in the early 1930s and set about transforming the buildings and grounds, creating the famous garden rooms that draw people from across the globe today. The National Trust took over managing the site in the 1960s, although members of the Sackville-West/Nicholson family still occasionally stay in the South Cottage. History lesson over (if you’d like to know more, start here), let’s move on.

The gardens are what we went to see, although you can also wander into a few rooms (the library, etc) and have a tour of South Cottage if you’re organised enough to get a timed ticket when you arrive (we weren’t). We did climb up to the top of the tower where I took these photos from each corner:

View to the north over the shop in the old piggery and restaurant in the granary (top left of photo).

To the south, over one of the garden rooms with the propagation area (no access, sadly) to the right behind the house and the lovely curved wall.

To the north-east-ish and the famous White Garden. The silvery tree you can see mid-left is a magnificent *Pyrus salicifolia* ‘Pendula’ (weeping silver pear).

South Cottage and a snippet of meadow bottom left.

Gardeners (all women, as far as I could tell) were clipping box hedging; you can just see the wheelbarrows, etc, in the bottom of the pic. It was all very carefully done with lines and spirit levels (which is not how I do it!).

The library in the foreground and the oast houses in the background.

The red brick buildings and garden walls provide the perfect backdrop to the swoon-inducing planting. Really, the planting is delicious. Roses, such gloriously scented roses – climbers trained perfectly against walls, bush roses left to grow huge, climbers growing up inside frames and over hoops, low-growing roses; the air was thick with their heady, intoxicating smell. And the irises and salvias, and magnificent euphorbias of all kinds, all at their peak. The grounds were full of wildflowers – oxeye daisies, tall buttercups, huge clovers, mixed grasses, all nodding and swaying in the breeze. The place is magical.