Perhaps the most famous of these gardens is the one at Sissinghurst Castle, home of the writer
and diplomat Harold Nicolson and his wife, the dramatic Vita Sackville-West, an excellent writer and the inspiration for the gender-shifting protagonist of Woolf’s novel “Orlando.” I had wanted to go to Sissinghurst Castle for decades, ever since my first editor, Harry Ford, proudly gave me a copy of a memoir he was publishing, by the son of Sackville-West and Nicolson.
By FRANCINE PROSEMAY 9, 2017
In the early decades of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf
and her friends, the artists, intellectuals and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, left London and went — to work, to spend summers, to wait out the German bombing raids and to conduct their tangled romances — into the bucolic countryside of Sussex and Kent, now two hours by car southeast of the city.
In the last decades of her life, Lee Miller became a hugely ambitious cook; Antony Penrose’s book “The Home of the Surrealists” includes photographs of dishes
that his mother made, among them, two cauliflowers tinted and made to look like a pair of pink breasts surrounded by deviled eggs resembling eyes, a creation that demonstrated her fondness for making Surrealist sculptures of food.
Quite a few of these brilliant bohemians were avid gardeners,
and in the spring, when this gorgeous region bursts into flower, one can visit the houses they decorated, the gardens they planted and the homes of the artists and celebrated horticulturists who lived nearby, with whom they exchanged ideas about art and landscape design.
The decision was made when I was invited to speak at a literary festival held annually at Charleston, the former home in
East Sussex of Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, who lived there with her husband, Clive Bell, and her lover, Duncan Grant.
Not only is Charleston less than an hour from Sissinghurst,
but it is also near Woolf’s home, Monk’s House, and a number of famous Kent and Sussex gardens.