Vita Sackville-West: her gardening legacy goes on A love of gardening permeates Vita's poetry, most notably her two long poems, "The Land" and "The Garden"; it also shapes her fiction. In her 1934 novel The Dark Island, she resorted to horticultural metaphor: "Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment." For 15 years, from 1946 to 1961, famous by then as the co-creator with her husband Harold Nicolson of the garden at Sissinghurst, Vita was a professional garden writer. Every Sunday morning, she sat down to write a column for the Observer. Although she would claim that the column filled her with loathing, it earned her legions of fans and the coveted Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. The Vita who emerges from her Observer columns, though practical in the soundness of her gardening advice, is a confirmed romantic in her approach to her favourite plants. She likens Fritillaria imperialis, the crown imperial, to "the stiff, Gothic-looking flowers one sometimes sees growing along the bottom of a medieval tapestry" and recalls her first sight of the plant in its native Persia: "In the midst of this moist luxuriance I suddenly discerned a group of the noble flower. Its coronet of orange bells glowed like lanterns in the shadows in the mysterious place. Plants for Vita were every bit as real as people: they had personalities, appealing and unappealing traits, physical attractions and elements of mystery. She once described a particularly exasperating member of her family as being "as floppy as an unstaked delphinium in a gale." It was plants that she considered her own contribution to the garden at Sissinghurst - "the maximum informality in planting." Her husband's contribution, by contrast, was "the strictest formality of design." For those millions of visitors who have travelled to Sissinghurst since the garden was first opened to the public on a single June weekend in 1938, Vita herself has become an archetype of the green-fingered aristocratic English chatelaine, "England's rose queen," as she was labelled by American journalists. The truth is less simple and not nearly so sweet. Her mother, Lady Sackville, described Vita as "a beautiful mask": the surface concealed unexpected secrets - hopes, anxieties and fears that were less beautiful. As Virginia Woolf, the most famous of her lovers, described Vita, "all about her is savage, patrician." In her gardening, as in her writing, she found a channel for those "savage" impulses which arose specifically in response to one aspect of aristocratic life - Vita's inability as a girl to inherit her family home of Knole. Knole, that sprawling Tudor palace in the Kentish greensward, set in 26 acres of garden within parkland reminiscent of the backdrop of a tapestry, was Vita's childhood home and, as she freely admitted, even to her husband, the great love of her life. The only child of the third Lord Sackville and his exotic, illegitimate, part-Spanish wife Victoria, Vita spent a lonely childhood dreaming of those swashbuckling Sackville ancestors, whose portraits lined Knole's galleries, and whose glamorous history shaped her identity. Following her father's death in 1928, Knole passed first to Vita's uncle and afterwards her cousin. Her sense of exclusion from the house and those ancestral acres to which she felt connected as by "some sort of umbilical cord" was agonising. It never left her. Over and over again, her novels extol the special magic of genius loci, the spirit of a place. That place is invariably an inherited house and garden. At Sissinghurst, Vita ultimately recreated something of the spirit of Knole in miniature. But even so, Sissinghurst could never replace Knole in her heart. Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson, Norah Lindsay, Edwin Lutyens and Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote all influenced Vita's gardening: today her reputation is as great if not greater than theirs. Yet her perceived legacy - Sissinghurst-inspired white gardens across the globe - is only part of the story. So, too, is her misappropriation by gardening snobs as an arbiter of all things tasteful in the garden. Vita's vision was too big, too romantic and above all too personal for conventional notions of good taste. Innovator and imitator, she created a garden at Sissinghurst that was both a statement of self-assertion and a means of rewriting her own history. At the end of her life, Vita described the process of writing fiction: "Ah, it is heavenly while it lasts. A sort of intoxication... You see suddenly, as in a finished picture, the entire shape and design of what you want to do. I don't say that you ever carry it out to your satisfaction, but for one brief moment of illumination you have apprehended the unity of what you meant. That is one of the few moments in life worth living. Happily, half a century after her death, the intoxicating effect of Vita's gardening vision at Sissinghurst, albeit changed and modified by those who have succeeded her, lasts and lasts. Matthew Dennison's biography of Vita Sackville-West will be published by HarperCollins Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, nr Cranbrook, Kent, are closed Wed/Thurs. For more information, see nationaltrust.org.uk