The Illustrated Garden Book
by Vita Sackville-West
On This Page
Description
source books for creting beautiful, easy-to-achieve interiors - even includes some templatesTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Twelve beautifully illustrated, essays on gardening arranged by month. Vita Sackville-West wrote gardening articles for the Observer from 1946 to 1961 from which these essays are taken. The author is well-known as the creator of the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the most visited garden in England. This is a very enjoyable read even for non-gardeners.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Best Gardening Books
133 works; 45 members
Author Information
99+ Works 7,273 Members
Poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West began writing as a child. Born at elegant Knole Castle, scene of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando (1928), Sackville-West was educated in that 365-room dwelling. In 1913 she married Harold Nicolson (see Vol. 3), journalist, diplomat, and biographer. Despite Nicolson's homosexuality and her own lesbian affair with show more Violet Trefusis, this marriage survived. Poems of East and West, her first book, was published in 1917. She remained unknown except by a small group of literary connoisseurs until 1927, when she received the Hawthornden Prize for a second volume of poetry. At this time she lived in London and was part of the Bloomsbury group, which also included Lytton Strachey (see Vol. 3), E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes (see Vol. 3), and Woolf. Sackville-West published many novels and volumes of poetry, biography, and family history, and several books on gardening, as well as book reviews and criticism. All of her writings reflect the same unhurried approach, deep reflection, and brilliantly polished style. Her influence on other writers, especially Woolf, was perhaps greater than her own individual achievement. The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931) are her best-known novels. Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicholson, recounted the close, but unconventional relationship of his parents in the memoir Portrait of a Marriage, published in 1973. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
All Editions
Some Editions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1986
- Important places
- Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England, UK
- First words
- January:
How precious are the flowers of mid-winter! Not the hothouse things, nor even the forced trusses of lilac, most of which, I understand, come from Holland, but the genuine toughs that for some strange reason elect... (show all) to display themselves out-of-doors at this time of year. - Quotations
- Hear next of winter, when the florid summer,
The bright barbarian scarfed in a swathe of flowers,
The corn a golden earring on her cheek,
Has left our north to winter's finer etching,
To raw-boned winter, when the... (show all) sun
Slinks in a narrow and a furtive arc,
Red as the harvest moon, from east to west,
And the swans go home at dusk to the leaden lake
Dark in the plains of snow.
Water alone remains untouched by snow.
- The Land
In February, if the days be clear
The waking bee, still drowsy on the wing,
Will guess the opening of another year
And blunder out to seek another spring.
Crashing through winter sunlight's pallid gold,
His clu... (show all)msiness sets catkins on the willow
Ashake like lambs' tails in the early fold,
Dusting with pollen all his brown and yellow,
But when the rimy afternoon turns cold
And undern squalls buffet the chilly fellow,
He'll seek the hive's warm waxen welcoming
And set about the chambers' classic mould.
- The Land
Sometimes in apple country you may see
A ghostly orchard standing all in white,
Aisles of white trees, white branches, in the green,
On some still day when the year hangs between
Winter and spring, and heaven is f... (show all)ull of light.
And rising from the ground pale clouds of smoke
Float through the trees and hang upon the air,
Trailing their wisps of blue like a swelled cloak
From the round cheeks of breezes.
- The Land
But for this summer's quick delight
Sow marigold, and sow the bright
Frail poppy that with noonday dies
But wakens to a fresh surprise;
Along the pathway stones be set
Sweet alysson and mignonette,
That when... (show all) the full midsummer's come
On scented clumps the bees may hum,
Golden Italians, and the wild
Black humble-bee alike beguiled:
And lovers who have never kissed
May sow the cloudy love-in-mist.
- The Land
When skies are gentle, breezes bland,
When loam that's warm within the hand
Falls friable between the tines,
Sow hollyhocks and columbines,
The tufted pansy, and the tall
Snapdragon in the broken wall,
Not f... (show all)or this summer, but for next,
Since foresight is the gardener's text,
And though his eyes may never know
How lavishly his flowers blow,
Others will stand and musing say
"These were the flowers he sowed that May".
- The Land
June of the iris and the rose.
The rose not English as we fondly think.
Anacreon and Bion sang the rose;
And Rhodes the isle whose very name means rose
Struck roses on her coins...
The Young Crusaders found the... (show all) Syrian rose
Springing from Saracenic quoins,
And China opened her shut gate
To let her roses through, and Persian shrines
Of poetry and painting gave the rose.
- The Garden
This little space which scented box encloses
Is blue with lupins and is sharp with thyme.
My garden all is overblown with roses,
My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,
As like a drunked honeybee I waver
From ho... (show all)use to garden and again to house,
And, undetermined which delight to favour,
On verse and rose alternately carouse.
-Sonnet
And August duly brought
Swarms of a summer enemy, of those
Small samurai in lacquered velvet dressed,
Innumerable in their vermin breed
As fierce and fiery as a spark of gleed,
Scavengers on a gormandising ques... (show all)t
To batten on the treasure of our crops
Of promised fruit, our gages, Golden Drops,
Our peaches downy as a youthful cheek,
Our nectarines, in adolescence sleek;
They came, destructive though we sought their nest,
Those fiends that rustic oracles call wopse.
- The Garden
Pack the dark fibre in the potter's bowl;
Set bulbs of hyacinth and daffodil,
Jonquil and crocus, (bulbs both sound and whole),
Narcissus and the blue Siberian squill.
Set close, but not so tight
That flow'ring... (show all) heads collide as months fulfil
Their purpose, and in generous sheaf expand
Obedient to th'arrangement of your hand.
Yours is the forethought, yours the sage control.
- The Garden
There reigns a rusty richness everywhere;
See the last orange roses, how they blow
Deeper and heavier than in their prime,
In one defiant flame before they go;
See the red-yellow vine leaves, how they climb
In ... (show all)desperate tangle to the upper air;
So might a hoyden gipsy toss and throw
A scarf across her disobedient hair.
See the last zinnias, waiting for the frost,
The deadly touch, the crystals and the rime,
Intense of colour, violent, extreme,
Loud as a trumpet lest a note be lost
In blackened death that nothing can redeem.
- The Garden
Forget not the bees in winter, though they sleep,
For winter's big with summer in her womb,
And when you plant your rose-trees, plant them deep,
Having regard to bushes all aflame,
And see the dusky promise of the... (show all)ir bloom
In small red shoots, and let each redolent name -
Tuscany, Crested Cabbage, Cottage Maid -
Load with full June November's dank repose.
- The Land
Then may you shoulder spade and hoe,
And heavy-footed homeward go,
For no new flowers shall be born
Save hellebore on Christmas morn,
And bare gold jasmine on the wall,
And violets, and soon the small
Blue n... (show all)etted iris, like a cry
Startling the sloth of February.
- The Land - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 278
- Popularity
- 115,417
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.06)
- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 13
- ASINs
- 11
