Vita Sackville West Garden Quotes

Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world.

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.

We owned a garden on a hill, We planted rose and daffodil, Flowers that English poets sing, And hoped for glory in the Spring. We planted yellow hollyhocks, And humble sweetly-smelling stocks, And columbine for carnival, And dreamt of Summer's festival. And Autumn not to be outdone As heiress of the summer sun, Should doubly wreathe her tawny head With poppies and with creepers red. We waited then for all to grow, We planted wallflowers in a row. And lavender and borage blue, - Alas! we waited, I and you, But love was all that ever grew.

Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment.

I sing once more The mild continuous epic of the soil

ON 26 July 1926, Vita Sackville-West gave the Woolfs a cocker spaniel puppy which they named Pinka (or Pinker). She ate holes in Virginia’s skirt and devoured Leonard’s proofs. “But”, writes Virginia, “she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day”. For nine years Pinka was the much loved companion of both Leonard and Virginia, though in time she became essentially Leonard’s dog. Loved as she was, the pattern of her life naturally became woven into the pattern of theirs. The daily habits; her walk with Leonard round Tavistock Square garden in the morning before the day’s work began. Her joke of extinguishing, with her paw, Virginia’s match when she lit a cigarette, and so on. Virginia mentions her again and again in letters and diaries.

She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen in its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead. So, she thought, could she at last put circles on her life. Slowly she crossed that day, as one crosses a field by a little path through the grasses, with the sorrel and the buttercups waving on either side; she crossed it again slowly, from breakfast to bed-time, and each hour, as one hand of the clock passed over the other, regained for her its separate character: this was the hour, she thought, when I first came downstairs that day, swinging my hat by its ribbons; this was the hour when he persuaded me into the garden, and sat with me on the seat beside the lake, and told me it was not true that with one blow of its wing a swan could break the leg of a man.

I sing the cycle of my country's year, I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing,

Prune my ambition to the lowly prayer That I may drive the furrow of my tale Straight, through the lives and dignities I know.

Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world. —VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, THE GARDEN

Together, Vita (Sackville-West) & Harold (Sir Harold Nicholson) had a passion bigger than them-selves, bigger than their marriage, bigger than everything~their garden. No matter what they did during their lives, the legacy they left for generations to come is pure magic.

April, the angel of the months. —Vita Sackville-West, Lady Nicholson (1892–1962) English poet, novelist, and garden designer