War time gardening charactersVita Sackville-West (1892 to 1962)Vita Sackville-West was a famous novelist, poet and gardener. She was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, home to Lord and Lady Sackville. She wrote poetry and ballads from a young age and produced eight novels and five plays between 1906 and 1910. She married the diplomat Harold Nicholson in 1913 and they moved to Cospoli, Constantinople. They returned to England in 1930, bought Sissinghurst Castle, which was in a very poor condition, and set about rebuilding and designing the house and gardens. Sackville-West in 1947 started a weekly column in the Observer called In your Garden. She became a founder member of the National Trust's garden committee in 1948, and in 1946 was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. She died of cancer on 2 June 1962. Harold Nicholson died six years later. Major Lawrence Johnston (1871 to 1958)Major Lawrence Johnston was born in 1871 in Paris to an English mother and an American father. He bought Hidcote Manor with his mother in 1907, and began the transformation of the gardens that was to last the next 40 years. The garden at Hidcote Manor is a key garden of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Johnston was an avid plant collector and went on many trips abroad to collect plants that could be cultivated in his gardens. His most important expedition was to Africa and China in 1927. Many plants are associated with him, including Verbena 'Lawrence Johnston' and Hypericum 'Hidcote'. In the 1920s the major acquired La Serre de la Madonna near Menton in the South of France. He grew many of his more tender and subtropical plants there that weren't suitable to the conditions at Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire. In 1948 Johnston retired to France and gave Hidcote to the National Trust. He died in France in 1958. |
