Sibylle Kreutzberger - a life in gardening, by Linda Newbery (guest)

Mention Sissinghurst to anyone remotely interested in gardening and the name Vita Sackville-West will come to mind. Visitors admiring the White Garden, the Nuttery, the Lime Walk and other famous Sissinghurst features may not realise, though, how much this world-renowned garden owes to two other significant plantswomen, Sibylle Kreutzberger and Pamela Schwerdt, joint head gardeners there from 1959 to 1990.

The pair became friends while training at Waterperry Horticultural School in Oxfordshire towards the end of the war, under the tutorship of another notable woman gardener, Beatrix Havergal, who was principal there. Having done some gardening work at her boarding school, Sibylle had been thinking of enrolling for a horticultural diploma at Studley when a family friend enthused about Miss Havergal. Waterperry was not at that time open to the public, but Beatrix Havergal occasionally gave demonstrations on topics such as pruning and how to make the best of a kitchen garden. For Sibylle, one of the attractions was that the clothes list for the course included two pairs of gumboots and a mackintosh - not a cap and gown, as at Studley: “It sounded like my kind of place.”

Beatrix Havergal at Waterperry, photographed by Cecil Beaton

In the late forties, with rationing still in force, growing fruit and vegetables at home was still important and the emphasis at Waterperry was on practicalities and produce, students there learning mainly through experience. Fruit and vegetables, as well as feeding the residents, were sold weekly at Oxford’s Covered Market. Fruit bushes and trees were sold in their thousands, packaged in straw and sent by road and rail. After completing her diploma, Sibylle stayed on, by request, for another eighteen months in the small scale vegetable department. After briefly working at Reading University in the Agricultural Botany department and then at an alpine nursery, she returned to Waterperry to do some lecturing to students and to run the Herbaceous Nursery.

By 1959, she and Pamela Schwerdt, who had stayed on as teacher during Sibylle's absence, were planning a project together. Feeling that life at Waterperry was “like being at school forever”, they aimed to establish their own nursery, but with no money or land their first challenge was to find a suitable and affordable site. They placed an advertisement in The Times personal column, asking if anyone might lease or lend them a plot of two acres or so. At the same time Pam wrote to Vita Sackville-West, who was at that time the Observer’s gardening correspondent. Vita replied suggesting that they try Wye College, in Kent, also mentioning that she needed a head gardener for Sissinghurst. Pam said firmly that there were two of them, and Vita invited them to visit.

Vita Sackville-West, painted in 1918 by William Strang

As it wasn’t what they were looking for, Pam and Sibylle didn’t immediately jump at the chance; in fact Sibylle says now that she wasn’t sure who was interviewing who. But replies to their Times advertisement hadn’t produced any suitable offers, and they decided to accept. Vita, Sibylle says, was ‘rather tickled’ by the idea of employing two young women at a time when female gardeners were rare. Sibylle recalls that in those early days visitors would stare at them in astonishment.

They lived on site in a cottage opposite the oasthouses and worked immensely long hours, returning to the garden or to paperwork after their evening meal. The garden was labour-intensive, on heavy Wealden clay where all the digging and cultivation was done by hand; there were no machines other than mowers. Later, these were supplemented by a small tractor, electric sprayers and hedge-cutters. The appointment of Pam and Sibylle brought the number of gardeners up to six; as time went by these were generally college-trained, and among those beginning their careers at Sissinghurst were several who went on to become head gardeners at National Trust properties.

Sibylle at work

Pam and Sibylle rarely took days off, their weekends being taken up with glasshouse duties and displaying plants for sale outside the gate. For this they used a yellow cart painted with pictures of Sissinghurst, formerly pulled by the resident donkey, Abdul. Fish boxes, painted yellow to match the cart, were used as staging for a pyramid of plants arranged to tempt visitors.

At the time they took up their employment, Vita Sackville-West (known to Sibylle and Pam as Lady Nicholson) was 67, and in variable health. She was often in the tower room she used for writing: “even the family weren’t allowed in there.” Thursdays would be “Observer day”, when she would shut herself away to write her gardening column. It’s rather unfair, Sibylle considers, that Vita generally receives sole credit for Sissinghurst. In the early days her husband Harold was fully involved with the planning; though at home only at weekends he attended RHS shows in London, bought plants and contributed ideas. He and Vita wrote letters to each other every day to discuss progress and planting.

The garden had already been open to the public for twenty years, but in a low-key way – from dawn to dusk, visitors could put their shilling in an honesty box. Vita’s style of gardening was romantic and blowsy but not aimed at providing interest throughout the season, and like many gardens Sissinghurst’s main period of flowering was in late spring and early summer, with not much of interest after July. Among the changes made by Pam and Sibylle was the extension of interest well into late summer and autumn, through the use of later-flowering perennials not hardy in this country but treated here as annuals and biennials: diascias, argyranthemum, penstemons and tender salvias. Besides that, the ever-increasing numbers of visitors – especially after Vita’s death and the taking over of the garden by National Trust – imposed its own pressures. Paths were subject to heavy wear and lawns damaged by tramping feet. Measures taken included the placing of prickly plants at the junctions of paths, to deter visitors from cutting corners and walking on the beds.

But Sibylle and Pam were doing far more than simply maintaining the work done by Vita. Their dedication, flair and skill were rewarded by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1980 when they were made Associates of Honour, and in 2006 they were given the society's highest honour, the Victoria Medal. “I can’t think what we did to deserve it,” Sibylle says now. Others disagree. The designer, plantsman and writer Dan Pearson is among those who give them a large part of the credit for Sissinghurst’s enduring status as an iconic garden:

“When the National Trust took over in 1967, five years after Vita’s death, an inevitable tightening up eventually saw the garden reach extraordinary horticultural heights in the hands of Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger who worked with Vita from 1959 until she died, but went on to make the garden their own during their 30 year tenure as joint head gardeners. Pam and Sibylle’s prowess with plants was a large part of what brought visitors to Sissinghurst in their droves in the 1970’s and ’80’s, securing its place as one of the most influential gardens in the world.” (Dig Delve, Dan Pearson’s weekly blog.)

Sibylle (left) and Pam in their own Gloucestershire garden

In 1990 Pam and Sibylle left Sissinghurst to buy a home and make a garden of their own, settling near Stow-on-the-Wold in a new wing of a 17th century farmhouse with a three-quarter acre plot that had been a field. Pam died in 2009, and the house and garden were sold to appreciative new owners who welcome visitors under the National Gardens Scheme. Still fit and active at 87, Sibylle now lives in an Oxfordshire retirement village where most of the residents are unaware of her achievements and the high regard in which she’s held in the gardening world. They may, however, see her wielding a spade and fork in the community plot where she grows flowers and herbs.

The current head gardener at Sissinghurst, Troy Scott-Smith, has embarked with the National Trust – and Dan Pearson as consultant - on a project to revitalize (or reVita-lise) the garden from its present formality to something more like Vita’s vision. It is, Dan Pearson writes, “a means of recapturing the potent sense of place that Vita Sackville-West celebrated in her writing … a garden inextricably linked to the buildings it surrounded and, in turn, the Kentish farmland and countryside that swept up to its walls.” Sibylle was invited to an initial meeting, and as she’s the only person to have worked directly with Vita Sackville-West her contribution must have been invaluable. 

When I asked Sibylle what had been most satisfying about her work at Sissinghurst, I expected her to refer to a particularly impressive planting or the opportunity to make her mark on a world-famous garden. Her reply was far simpler:

“I like being outside by myself. And I like digging.”

Linda Newbery is the author of  Set in Stone, The Shell House, Lob and many other titles. The Key to Flambards will be published in October.

WEEDS AND WEEDING WOMEN, by Jane Borodale

© Valerie Hill

‘As oft as nede shall require it must be weeded, for else the wede woll overgrowe the hearbs.’ (Fitzherbert, 1532) 

This slovenly gardener (I mean me) has been taken by surprise. Lulled into a false sense of security by the lateness of spring, then just two days of sunshine, and suddenly the bare land is alarmingly green and bristling with a mass of creeping buttercup, ground elder, coltsfoot and bursts of dock and dandelion.

So I’m thinking about historical weeds. Our idea of what a weed is has changed, of course, over time. Many plants we now consider pests have been thought of in the medieval period (and earlier) as food or medicine. But some plants have always been more cosmopolitan, persistent and hungry than others, and they know no boundaries. 

© Valerie Hill

In his celebrated book Weeds (2010) Richard Mabey describes how the first Neolithic settlers in Britain brought seeds of corn poppy, charlock and wild radish inadvertently with their wheat and barley grains in 3500 BCE. Groundsel came with the Bronze Age. The Romans brought ground elder to feed their livestock. Rosebay willowherb started its journey here as a rare garden specimen in the 16th century that slowly, joyously escaped and by the 19th century was rampaging along the railway system, like Oxford ragwort. Nettles too have always followed the human trail, thriving in soil rich with our waste and decomposition and ash – on midden heaps and churchyards, and fields improved with manure from pond silt and grazing livestock. Weeds, like crop-methods, are evolving all the time – and keeping up.

'Burning Weeds', Alexander Mann (1853-1908)

How were they dealt with? In the larger Tudor gardens, weeders were most often poor women working for a few pennies a day. Historian C. Paul Christianson has studied 16th century accounts of the Bridge House garden in London, and in The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London, looks at records of the large numbers of female staff working there and at York Place and Hampton Court. He says that, ‘it was chiefly women, often at first noted in the accounts simply as “a weding woman” or “a pore widow to wede the gardeyn” who were employed,’ often for a pitiful per diem of 2d - 4d. Garden weeds were picked as now by hand, sometimes wearing three-fingered weeding gloves (presumably for protection against bramble, thistle and the rasping, prickly langue-de-boeuf). In the fields though, before hoeing became more widespread in England, cropweeds were tackled thus:

French miniature, c1180

‘Ye have a wedyne-hoke with a socket, set upon a little staffe a yard longe, and this hoke would be ground sharpe, both behind and before. In his other hand he hath a forked styke a yarde longe, and with the fork putteth the weed from him, and he putteth the hoke beyond the roote of the wede, putteth it to him and cutteth the weed fast by the earth.’ (Fitzherbert). 

The fields must have been continually dotted with labourers weeding along the rows, throughout the season. No spraying of herbicides to rely on then – yet according to the 20th edition of The Agricultural Notebook, modern weeds are as troublesome as they ever were. 

Cleavers © Valerie Hill

Cleavers (or goosegrass, or sticky willy, depending on where you're from) can cause a staggering 40 percent loss to a broad-leaved crop, and annual grass weeds such as blackgrass or wild oats in cereal crops as much as a quarter. Other major agricultural weeds in the UK currently include chickweed, Japanese knotweed, thistles and speedwell, and it’s fascinating to compare these species with the main weeds of Fitzherbert’s or Thomas Tusser’s medieval farmland. They would have grappled with our own familiar adversaries like dock, mayweed, cleavers and thistle. Still a major cropweed now, The Niewe Herball (1578) says of poor or wild oats for example that it is, ‘a hurtfull plant to the Rie as other corne.’ 

Field bindweed © Valerie Hill 

But Fitzherbert and Tusser class as pests some that we’d now consider wildflowers; such as knapweed, cornflower, corncockle and pink mallow. Dorothy Hartley mentions in 1979 how it is no longer the vetches ‘that pull downward’, but bindweed. 

It’s an age-old battle. Literally; many annual weed seeds can stay viable in undisturbed soil for startling tracts of time, waiting till conditions are right before germination. Geoffrey Grigson in The Englishman’s Flora (1958) has a great phrase; ‘plough up the old grass, and up comes the charlock, like a vegetable rat.’ Weeds are wily, tough as old boots, and can be very, very patient. Archaeological sites unearthing soil previously covered to some depth have suddenly bloomed with ancient varieties of plant that have lain dormant for as much as 2000 years – truly the living past.

Mayweed © Valerie Hill

The presence of weeds is confusing, too – because as well as being the enemy of the farmer and the tidy mind, they have individual virtues of their own. Whether or not they’re welcome is all about context. 16th-century Henry Lyte, who translated The Niewe Herball, was as much a gardener and husbandman with an estate to run, as he was a herbalist. So he would have understood the repetitive tedium of hand-weeding running grasses, horsetail or bittercress, and while recognising the virtues of any variety of plant he would also have known its nuisance. He says for example: ‘The roote of Rest Harrow or Petie Whin is long and very limmer, spreading under the earth, and doth often times let, hinder and stay both the plough and Oxen in toiling the ground’. However, ‘the barke of the roote taken with hony, provoketh urine and breaketh the stone’. Elsewhere he explains how darnel ‘is a vitious graine that cumbereth or annoyeth corne,’ and yet, ‘with pigions dung, oyle and linseed, boiled and layd plaisterwise upon wens doth dissolve and heale them.’ Bracken in the wrong place disrupts upland and hill grassland, but in the past was an important resource in its own right, for fuel and soap production.

Broad-leaved dock © Valerie Hill

I’m thinking that the process of writing is very much like weeding – it’s all about taking things out, for the good of the whole. Not just at the editing stage, (which is more like the final tidy-up before winter) but the whole way through writing a novel. It’s always about giving enough space to the significant idea or image, not letting it be choked with superfluous word-clutter or unnecessary infill. It’s a fight against those weeds/words of the subconscious, chattering mind that never shuts up; that never stops germinating, propagating, spreading sideways. Fields (or plots!) must be constantly gone over if they are to yield anything. Countless seedling ideas and thought-shoots ripped up and discarded before they get a hold, in order for a few to flourish… Hurrah for the weed-hook and the delete button, because the minute we stop weeding, the game’s over. At the best of times – we’re just keeping the wilderness at bay. Pretending that our thoughts are orderly, sequential, cultured, when really it’s a never-ending battle, above and below ground…

Jane Borodale’s novel The Knot is out in paperback with Fourth Estate - this Thursday! 

There are plenty of weeds in it.

Visit www.janeborodale.com

WHAT'S FOR SUPPER? by Jane Borodale

The horsemeat contamination debacle has thrown up familiar discussions in our household as elsewhere; about the convoluted nature of our modern food chain and how vulnerable it leaves us, and how passive our consumption is. 

Grimani Breviary: February (Flemish), c1490

But how easy was it to feed your household in February in the past, when production could be (largely) in your own hands or at least in the hands of those working nearby? What was available and what was being prepared for future months? What tasks out there in the yard or garden would I have to be busy with right now if I couldn’t open the fridge-freezer or nip to Tesco?

I’d rather vaguely assumed that there was very little around to eat in February, that the diet must be dull and barrel-scraping, relentlessly salty and lacking in variety – especially once the restrictions of Lent kicked in: an added challenge for both housewife and husbandman. And since pancake day I’ve been wondering whether there were ever years in the past when the hens hadn’t even started laying by Shrove Tuesday for this very egg-orientated feast (can any historian-chickenkeepers out there enlighten me, please?).

Les Tres Riches Heures du duc
de Berry: (February, detail)
Limbourg brothers,  c1412

The Anglo Saxons apparently called February solmonath, or ‘mud month.’ I don’t know whether the seasons were more advanced on the Continent – but the Dutch called February Spokkelmaand, or ‘vegetation month’ which, looking out of my window (there are actual icicles today), seems very optimistic.

A glance at February entries in the diary of the Somerset parson, William Holland, shows his household busy even in this cold month of 1806:

Feb 8 – John finished spreading the dung in the Paddock.

Feb 11 – Sent John into the garden to prepare ground for potatoes. Turned the great horse into the churchyard to stretch his limbs. Walked to Court House and got some seeds from Furse, he had pease and beans very fine, and Early Peep potatoes. Rain came on after dinner so we could not plant any.

Feb 12 – A fine pleasant day. I put down my Early Peep potatoes and John planted carrots and onions.

Feb 19 – This evening sat by a good fire and with my family compared the Four Evangelists on the Resurrection. (It would have been Ash Wednesday.)

Feb 20 – John went on still very well in the garden but he was called off rather soon to go with our little sow to the boar to Strinxon, Farmer Landsey went with him.

Plucking examples at random: 16^th-century household accounts at high-status Wollaton Hall show salt fish eaten in great quantities during Lent, such as cod, eel, ling, pollack and lobbe. Salted and dried, or salted and packed in barrels, which was called green fish. There was also stockfish, which was air-dried, and preserved herring. And there was fresh fish available in Lent from local suppliers and inland markets – historian Mark Dawson in Plenti and Grase mentions a great variety of fresh sea-fish and freshwater fish, including cod, skate, turbot and thornback. Big households also had the advantage of fishponds on their estates, for more readily caught bream, pickerel, pike, tench and by the end of the century, carp.

For those that could afford it, dried fruit was a part of the Lenten diet too – figs, prunes, currants, almonds, and there were always spices and other flavourings to ring the changes.

Giles Moore of Sussex records various purchases on the 17^th and 18^th Feb 1663 for ‘an entertainment’, including a Quart Bottel of Sack, 3 pecks of barley malt, Pullet, three nayle of Beef, halfe a pound of sugar, spice, bread, butter, rosewater. A few days before, he’d bought a gallypot of greene Ginger. (Though I should say it wasn’t quite Lent yet, as a quick check in Cheney’s ‘Handbook of Dates’ shows that Easter was 19^th April this year.)

Spinacia oleracea,
Otto Wilhelm Thome,
Flora von Deutschland, 1885

There was greenery too, if you planned ahead: 16^th-century gardener Thomas Hill talks about the importance of planting with Lent in mind. He says that spinach is the ‘plant aptest for Lent … the first Pot-herb which is found in gardens about [this] time. This plant very well endureth … cold, frosts and snow.’ He goes on to point out the merits of the ‘Carot and Parsnep .. sown in harvest time to enjoy them all the Lent.’ And there were other roots that would keep well until now – dried peas and beans, and stored keeping apples and pears of very many kinds.

17^th-century Hannah Woolley gives us a Bill of Fare suitable for every Month in the Year, and suggests for February:

A Chine of roast-Pork, Veal or Beef roasted, A Lamb-Pye, and Mince-Pyes, a couple of wild Ducks, a couple of Rabbits, fried Oysters, a Skirret-Pye. And for the second course: A whole Lamb roasted, three Widgeons, a Pippin-Pye, a Jole of Sturgeon, a cold Turkey-Pye.

By far the largest section in 18^th-century Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery is devoted to recipes for fasting food – from Crawfish Soop to Buttered-wheat and Chesnut Pudding. She lists foods available at this time of year, including: ‘many sorts of cabbage and savoy, small herbs on the hot beds (i.e. hot with dung) also mint, tarragon preserved under glass, chervil, sallary, marigold flowers and mint dried, beet-leaves, sorrel…’

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, but my overall feeling, having glanced over these February choices from the past, is that although we pride ourselves on the range of year-round food drawn from all over the world available to us - in the past (for those who could afford it), there was quite a startling array of fresh or readily-available food.

I don’t really approve of hankering after the past per se, and am grateful not to have to be taking my sow to the boar today in order to ensure a supply of pork for the months ahead – but right now I’m thinking that it might be interesting to try a nice fresh pickerel served with colliflower and followed by a dessert of Golden-pippin or Winter Pepperning, or a Dagobent Pear… Anyone care to join me?