For pleasure and leisure

...and the gardens that give it

Everything feels dialled up at the moment. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m crawling towards a much-needed holiday, a bit fraught and worn out, or just because it is all *quite intense*. The soap opera-horror movie hybrid that is international politics is hard to disassociate from, as much as I tell myself it’s not really my job to solve that one. The news cycle spews out seemingly relentless doom and the weather is giving major end of world vibes. Maybe it’s a mix of it all. Maybe I just need a change of scene. But happily gardens have provided much needed reminders of a different narrative - the passion and love that really keeps the world spinning.

The first of these is Sissinghurst, which totally blew my socks off, quite something for a garden as famed as this. For despite its superstar status, it’s an intensely personal and intimate place, it feels like rifling through someone’s knicker drawer. It’s both a portrait of a marriage - an unconventional but enduring one - and also a selfie in garden format, a mirror of the maker. This is all deeply unfashionable these days - it’s got to look uncontrived, like nature intended – the no make-up look that we all know requires quite a lot of skill and intervention. But this is not that. This is gardening for pleasure writ large. And pleasure was so much of Vita’s life –  her well-documented affairs, her love of the arts, her poetry all speak to a vitality and greedy thirst for beauty that is impossible to ignore at Sissinghurst. You get a real sense of screw it, I’ll do as I please thanks very much, this is what brings me joy - and its wholly refreshing, like walking through someone else’s uninhibited fantasy. And also indulgent, unashamedly so – a whole garden room to express a colour palette, areas that celebrate different seasons, the time to linger and devote your days to the garden and your evenings to letters to lovers. What a rare treat.

The next was Charleston, a garden which Vita would have spent plenty of time in canoodling with lover Virginia Woolf and perhaps swapping seedlings and idly helping out with a bit of weeding on a sunny afternoon. It’s a garden that is famed more for the people that spent time there, than horticultural prowess. Not that it’s not gorgeous, in that charming, and very British slightly dishevelled way. Hollyhocks sway drunkenly over beds of cottagey faves in an accidental dolly mixture of colours, all enclosed in comforting knapped flint walls, which do a great job of blocking out the reality of the Big Wide World – now as much as then.

I was there for the Festival of the Garden, a yearly event that pulls a stellar crowd of speakers and guests. Among others, a personal design hero of mine Jinny Blom talked about how she conjures landscapes into existence and her very intuitive (and enviable) approach to creating gardens. Again, the tussle between intervening or not arose – we’re all so rapt by the idea of letting go, not interfering, allowing nature to do Her thing. And as wonderful as Her thing is, a garden by very definition is a place that has been created – out of love and passion for a place, a moment in history, an obsession (ahem, Sissinghurst). And there is zero shame in this because gardening for beauty and aesthetic gratification is entirely compatible, both ethically and ecologically, with nature. We don’t need to choose one or the other, we can absolutely have both – and we should be grabbing opportunities to indulge in, explore and create beautiful places as much as we can. They’re vital. Vital expressions of our humanity, vital in delivering joy and keeping us sane in a mad, bad and confusing world. We should all plant and garden in a way that allows for pleasure, in a way that pleases us – not according to the diktat of the day – and chances are, the rest will follow (unless pleasing you means Astroturf).

The world doesn’t need another rant on why we need beauty, and frankly it’s obvious. But it was very good to feel it in those gardens, and to feel it in sufficient intensity that it was able to puncture the heavy fog of existential doom that’s been following me around like a bad smell for months. Pleasure is a great thing, and so is its sister, leisure. Let’s all lean into that for a bit, might do us all some good. See you in September.