I trip and lose my footing in the here and now. Climbing the stairs past a stained-glass saint in the turret of the 16th-century tower at Sissinghurst, one could be anywhere in time. The spirit of the place – timeless fantasy – permeates, and I’m in the mood for a quest. Looking out from the roof, the land that a wakeful Vita Sackville-West would draw from at night breathes greenly on this late spring day, and my eye searches for its object of desire – an iris.
The gardener in Sackville-West accompanied her husband, Harold Nicolson, in daylight hours, planting and planning and organising, for ‘foresight is the gardener’s text’. But the writer in Vita was a nocturnal animal. ‘It seems to me that I only really begin to live once the sun has gone down and the stars come out,’ she said, working by lamplight from her room in the turret I trip up, where, today, a single primrose-yellow ‘Sahara’ iris has been cut and placed in a vase. It glows in her blinded room as one of the 100-odd species of iris at Sissinghurst. They are often described as ‘the shooting stars’ of the garden after their crackling display of colour, fleetingly drawing the eye of every beholder, like a shower of stars. Many of the Sissinghurst irises also bloom in May, then, like a periodic comet, return for another season in the sun with a second bloom in September.
Today, I am searching for my favourite of all irises, the rare ‘Three Oaks’ (nigh on impossible to get one’s hands on in Britain), a comma of copper fire, burning blue-hot on its tongue. Tall, bearded irises, they are known as such because of this subgenus’s stubble-like line of hair on the lower petals. In ‘Three Oaks’ the beard is a scream of yellow, trailing into a tail of blue and ember orange. Bred by hybridiser Agnes Whiting of Iowa, known for her spectacular array of bearded irises, it is emblematic of Sackville-West’s fondness for the many cultivars produced in the 1930s and 40s, including those reared by her friend, the painter and plantsman Cedric Morris (WoI March 2023), famous for his ‘Benton End’ collection.
Irises are the surrealists of the garden, the miracle, the phoenix. In Mandy Kirkby’s book The Language of Flowers they are said to symbolise wisdom, charm, ecstasy, and their swordlike green spears speak of valour. Vita alluded to this knightly quality in The Land, writing: the ‘iris salutes her with his broad green blade’. And it was irises that her lover’s husband, Leonard Woolf, planted in an act of rebellion instead of listening to Hitler’s speech on the wireless; as manifestations of extreme beauty, he said: ‘They will be flowering long after he [Hitler] is dead.’
I find this falling meteor of a flower at the foot of her turret. With burnished, chalice-like domed standards, ‘Three Oaks’ is a masterclass in genetic manipulation: the burning, holy grail of the Iridaceae. It stands ochre red like the dust that collects on cars in its ancestral home of the Midwest, ochre red like the walls of Sackville-West’s room, in which she wrote that epiphanic glimpses of nature’s mystery and truth, glimpses like this, ‘come to us fragmentary from a whole, as meteorites from space’
Illustration by Işik Güner
The ‘Three Oaks’ iris, which was bred by Agnes Whiting of Iowa and can be found at Sissinghurst Castle Garden. For more information visit nationaltrust.org.uk
