Spires & Towers
Nature doesn’t plant in rows, so why should we? Explore how Vita Sackville-West’s wild and generous garden style mirrors the richness of natural ecosystems!
Old Ideas in New Frames
We’ve all heard the saying “everything old is new again.” Stick around long enough and you’ll experience how things fall in and out of fashion, sometimes faster than we’d like. But every so often, an idea, once put to paper, is too good to drop out of favor. The idea has a life of its own and long survives its first advocates, finding a new audience and a new expression with each subsequent generation.
While reading about garden design, we came across the celebrated English gardener Vita Sackville-West, known for her strong design ideas that still resonate well with modern garden designers. For those unfamiliar with Vita Sackville-West, she was a noted author who wrote prodigiously, from poetry to novels to garden books, and lived at Sissinghurst Castle with her diplomat husband, Harold Nicholson in the 1930s-1960s. Each week, she penned a garden column that ran in The Observer from 1946 to 1961 based on her experiences building the famous Sissinghurst gardens. Her observations and writings are considered mandatory reading for gardeners in the UK, and Sissinghurst Castle is widely regarded as one of the best gardens in the world. While our Mid-Atlantic climate can be pretty different from the gentle seasons of the Kent countryside, some ideas have wings that travel far and wide.
‘Cram, cram, cram’
‘Cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny. My liking for gardens to be lavish is an inherent part of my garden philosophy. I like generosity wherever I can find it, whether in gardens or elsewhere. … Always exaggerate rather than stint. Masses are more effective than mingies.’
- Vita Sackville-West, 1955
When others preferred orderly lines of individual plants perfectly spaced, Vita was an advocate for generosity in her planting design. More is more. Full, lush plantings, layered with bulbs, perennials, shrubs, and trees, provide year-round interest and beauty. As native plant lovers, we can’t help but agree with such thinking. Plants are naturally generous givers. For a little bit of work in finding the right plant for the space and getting it settled in, you’ll receive years of pleasure as it thrives.
Additionally, in the wild, plants don’t grow as individual specimens. It’s not in their nature. When you plant in large groups, it punctuates the garden, giving it seasonal dynamism. Some may think the word ‘cram’ has a negative connotation, as if there isn’t enough room, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Native plant lovers know. Observe a prairie. A single square yard can have more than 70 species of plants, rich in biodiversity. But cramming a garden design full of plants isn’t just for our visual satisfaction. Providing large groups of the same plant is a beacon to native wildlife, which travel far and wide to find adequate nesting habitat and food. Studies show that foraging wildlife has an easier time finding and utilizing plants if they are planted in drifts and not lone units. (Read more about Optimal Foraging Theory on The Plug) Not only that, but layering plants and planting plants in unusual spaces, in every nook and cranny, will maximize habitat and flower power. Revel in the abundance and adaptability of plants and cram plants in the cracks in a wall, in the corner of a stairwell, in every square inch of a planting bed, up and over a trellis. The phrase gives us permission to do what plant lovers already want to do - to cover the bare earth in the joy of plants.
While cramming a garden full of plants was considered quite unconventional and wild in her time, the writings of Vita Sackville-West feel even more relevant today. Private gardens and public spaces are becoming counterpoints and refuges for native plants and wildlife in the face of the looming threat of habitat loss. Large groups of plants create a sense of abundance in the garden, offering a generous welcome to all who enter the space. So, we say, while the words were written in 1955, it holds even more true now - ‘cram, cram, cram in every chink and cranny.’
‘Spires and minarets’
Another design idea Vita Sackville-West often applied was her observation of adding triangular punctuation marks by using flower spires to add height and dimension in a garden. Frequently, plants will grow in mounded forms, creating an undulating mass in the landscape. By dotting flower spikes through the mounded plants, the taller towers of flowers add height and help move the eye through the space. Her inspiration came while living in Constantinople (now modern-day Istanbul) with her husband, a British diplomat. Vita observed the beautiful skylines of Islamic design, with domed mosques punctuated by their minarets. The minarets are towers that rise high above the city and are where the muezzin leads a call to prayer for the faithful. The vertical spires interrupting masses of domes —a majestic design combination employed for hundreds of years by Islamic architecture. The beauty and the perfect proportions never left Vita even as they returned home to England. It inspired her to pen several poems and later, to apply the visual effect to the garden. In the famous White Garden of Sissinghurst, she writes that she used dome-shaped plants, such as shrubby peonies or roses, with spires of foxgloves, Eremus, lilies, or delphiniums. (For a modern-day example, see Sarah Raven’s rose garden) However, this striking design manifestation is not limited to English cottage garden favorites - we can riff on this idea on this side of the Atlantic.
In a Mid-Atlantic garden, instead of peonies, we can utilize mounded forms of Asters, Rudbeckia, or Amsonia. Then, instead of the English wildflower foxgloves, we can include repeating spires of tall Mid-Atlantic flowers through the drifts of mounded plants, such as Liatris, Lobelia, or Solidago flexicaulis. This effect works best by selecting spike plants with low visual clutter - tall spikes of flowers with limited to no foliage along the stem that weighs down the eye. Plants with flowers emerging from clumping basal foliage are typically the best choice, but it can also be done by choosing upright foliage “pillars” of plants that create towers in the garden.
Flower Spire Plants
Echinacea pallida
Echinacea paradoxa
Eryngium yuccifolium
Rudbeckia maxima
Ratibida pinnata
Rudbeckia lacinata
Sorghastrum nutans
Liatris spicata
Lobelia cardinalis
Solidago flexicaulis
Veronicastrum virginicum
Pillar Plants
Calamagrostis
Sorghastrum nutans ‘Golden Sunset’
Schizachyrium scoparium ‘Standing Ovation’
Mounded Perennials
Vernonia lettermanii ‘Iron Butterfly’
Amsonia
Asters such as ‘Purple Dome’, ‘Vibrant Dome’, ‘Radon’s Favorite’, ‘October Skies’, ‘Twilight Sky’
Rudbeckia ‘American Gold Rush’
Monarda ‘Petite Delight’
Muhlenbergia
Porteranthus trifoliatus
Good Design is Timeless
On rainy days, we can be found paging through old garden books, from William Robinson’s groundbreaking ‘The Wild Garden’ to the 1,000-year-old Japanese text ‘Sakuteiki’, the first garden planning manuscript in the world. Good design is timeless, and people have long sought to make their spaces beautiful by the careful planning and arrangement of plant materials. We can never exactly replicate the work of another, and we certainly do not want to. However, to be inspired by the garden makers of the past, to see the world through their eyes, and to build upon the ideas that resonate with us, we can create landscapes that have echoes of the past while meeting the challenges of the future.
Read more about Sissinghurst here:
Nicholson, Adam. “In the Night Garden.” The World of Interiors, 27 June 2023.
