Some American “scones” may be delicious in their own way, but they aren’t scones. Now that we’ve got that clear, let’s move on.

Scone + clotted cream + strawberry jam.

I had at least one a day. The scones they made at the restaurant across from the gift shop were seriously good. I had one or two there, but more often than not we would get them to go so we could sit out in “our” garden. This would mean that I was eating them at 5:30 pm most evenings, but hey, when the sun doesn’t disappear until almost 10, why not?

I’m a big fan of rooms that are frozen in time, especially if they feature papers, or maps, or books, or push pins, or typewriters (Cabinet War Room anyone…). When you add Vita Sackville-West to this equation, and factor in the idyllic setting at Sissinghurst and the fact that her study is up in a tower, the whole concept starts to reach a ridiculous level of perfection. A room frozen in 1962, chock full of books, art, and a cozy chaise-longue.

During our week-long stay at Sissinghurst I visited Vita’s study in the tower on three separate occasions. Happily, each time I went it was late enough in the day that no other visitor was blocking the view and no one was waiting to see the view so I could stare to my heart’s content. Since you can’t actually walk into the room, my only regret is that I didn’t have binoculars to get a better look at the titles on the shelves. But I did stand there, probably with my mouth open, fantasizing about the space being mine. I would have settled for a couple of hours inside to browse the shelves and take a closer look at everything.

Bottom line is that it is the perfect room for me. I will let the pictures speak for themselves, with one exception. They keep the curtains drawn to preserve the books, art, and textiles, but the room has large banks of windows on both sides of the tower, which would make it a very light room–and one with cross breezes.

Day four of our Sissinghurst adventure started with sun and ended with sun…well, and then a bit of lightning.

When my eyes popped open around 5:00 am with sunlight flooding our room, I decided not to fight it and went for a walk across the fields. The weather was gorgeously cool in the low sixties (he says as he types in hot, humid, DC) and it was fantastically peaceful.

Just after lunch our young, charismatic, fun, smart, bookish, telejournalist, British friends,  William and Lorna, who Simon Thomas virtually introduced us to several years ago when they moved to DC, arrived for an overnight stay. After a very brief orientation, I sent them out into the gardens before it started to rain and so they would have plenty of time to see Vita’s study and the library before they closed. In the true spirit of the setting, I was pleased when they came back to the house and said they wanted to just chill out and read while it spitted rain.

When drinks time rolled around, the light rain had stopped, the sun was coming out, the garden was closed for the day, Lorna made Pimms Cups, and we went and sat in the boat house pavilion. After a bit we heard applause in the near distance. Something of some sort was going on in our garden.

A few minutes later a tall man carrying a champagne flute and bearing the visage of a Nicolson/Sackville-West appeared, introduced himself as Adam Nicolson and explained they were having a little event and that he hoped we weren’t inconvenienced. We assured him there was no problem at all, John fanboy’d for a bit, and I asked if there was any part of the garden he would like us to avoid. All of this was significant for a couple of reasons. First, this was the author Adam Nicolson–grandson of Vita and Harold–coming over to make sure we were okay with him using his ancestral home for a small event. Second, even though by this time in our stay we were pretty comfortable roaming the property at all hours, it was a whole new level of comfort to have Adam Nicolson welcome us and reassure us that his garden was our garden. Third, the event included Adam’s wife Sarah Raven who is a garden maven herself and John tells me has Martha Stewart level cache in the UK. Again John fanboy’d, albeit from a distance this time, when we walked by while she was chatting with some guests in the White Garden.

I wish I had a some sort of picture to represent this, but alas, I don’t.

For dinner we went to the nearby Three Chimney’s gastro pub for dinner where they happily still had the smoked haddock with creamy leeks on the menu that I had had about six years previously. Then it was back to the house where we strolled in the garden as it got dark and the sky started to fill with lightning. By the time we all trundled off to bed we were in the middle of a proper storm with lightning, rain, and thunder–or at least what passes for thunder in the UK.

What do you do for a day trip when you are spending the week at a world-famous garden? Why, visit another world-famous garden of course. John has always wanted to attend a study day at Great Dixter. As luck would have it, they were offering a full-day workshop on succession planting while we are staying at Sissinghurst, and since the two gardens are only about 30 minutes from each other, it seemed like a no-brainer. I decided to be a good sport and go along with John, but I ended up really enjoying myself. First off, we had been to Great Dixter once before and I knew it was beautiful. Second we had perfect weather. Third, we met very nice like minded people. Fourth, since it was a Monday, the garden was closed to visitors. Fifth, I really learned a lot and feel like I have graduated from Assistant to the Gardener to Assistant Gardener.

I thought you might want a bookish change of pace in the midst of all the Sissinghurst photos. So what better than a run down of book purchases from our trip. The majority of them were purchased on our one day in London. I had sent out an SOS on Twitter hoping for recommendations for used bookstores in London. I know where pretty much all the new bookstores are, and I knew there are used stores along and near Charing Cross Road, but for all the times I have been to London, I have never really explored the second shops there and realized that I didn’t know where to start. Happily the Twitterverse crowdsourcing paid off and I had a great day running around London with John popping into many stores.

I should mention that near the car park at Sissinghurst there is a little cafe/plant shop that also had a charity secondhand book stall inside. It would have been perfect if I had run out of reading material (I didn’t) as the books in the snug in our cottage didn’t really excite me too much. But more on that in a future post.

After a very good night’s sleep, woke up to bright sunshine around 6:00 am. Nothing ahead of us for the day except for friends arriving from London for the day. By the time they arrived around 11:00, it was starting to spit rain. So we sat under a market umbrella outside the restaurant and had tea. Then a wander through the woods followed by lunch at the Milk House pub nearby in the tiny blip in the road known as Sissinghurst Village.

Still getting used to the fact that we had the place to ourselves, we decided to stay in for dinner. And not having a ton of energy after not getting much sleep on our overnight flight, we decided a simple meal was in order. We relished our bread and cheese dinner with some hummus and olives thrown in, followed by fresh strawberries with vanilla custard.

They had a very nice digital radio in the kitchen/dining room which meant we could double down on the English-ness of the moment with the BBC. I’m not sure what I expected, but I was a little disappointed in what was available. Instead of classical music on Radio 3 they were playing a dramatization of something. But this was no Day of the Triffids or Cranford, it was some modern thing with lots of s***s and f***s. And Radio 4 didn’t provide something homey like Barbara Pym on Desert Island Discs or the shipping forecast, it was some news programming with too many American accents. It wasn’t always like this during our stay, but that first night it was kind of disappointing that the radio was in 2019 not 1949.

We did manage to stay up until about 10 pm. And then, what I like to call, the sleep of the ages. That feeling of total, beautiful, exhaustion after having been up for over 24 hours. It feels so good. And to be able to sleep with the windows open, cool air flowing in, snuggled under a cozy duvet. Bliss.

We had been to Sissinghurst twice before. The first time was on a day trip from London during a rather dry July. The second time was at the start of a late-May driving tour that included Rye, Great Dixter, Hidcote, the Cotswolds, and Oxford. On that second trip we stayed overnight at the very nice B&B that is immediately adjacent to the gardens on the estate grounds. Staying there we saw how nice it was to be in the garden toward closing time at 5:30 when the bulk of the tourists had left for the day. So a few years ago when John came across something online that said that you could rent the Priest’s House and have after-hours access to the garden it seemed too good to be true. It didn’t take long before we decided we must give it a go.

Given that we wanted to stay there in June, a very popular month for gardens, we thought it might be a little hard to get a reservation. When I called the National Trust they told me we could book up to two years in advance. And that is exactly what we did. I waited until it was exactly two years before the dates we thought would work and made the reservation and put down a 50% deposit.

And then suddenly, two years later, there we were. There were many moments over those two years where I was convinced that there was a typo somewhere and we wouldn’t really have after-hours access to the garden. But then we got there and I happily discovered that I had been worried over nothing.

We. Had. The. Whole. Place. To. Ourselves.

Yes, there appeared to be a caretaker couple who lived on site, and some of the Nicolsons still have a weekend home in part of the main building and use the South Cottage in the month of June, but, with very little exception, these folks were invisible during our stay. And yes, in the morning there were gardeners on site, but they also didn’t get in our way and were super helpful and friendly when we had questions.

I should also mention at this point that England in June has really long days. We are talking sun up at 4:40 AM and sunset close to 10 PM. Since the garden is only open to the public from 11:00 to 5:30, this meant we had about 10 hours of daylight in the garden pretty much all to ourselves. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but it is still amazing to me that we had such an amazing opportunity to experience Sissinghurst as if it were ours (without all the work).

More details and photos in the coming days, but I thought I would post a few snaps to give you a sense of our living conditions for the week.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, John and I planned to spend a week at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens in Kent, England–much more on that in the days to come–but we had some time to kill between our overnight Transatlantic flight and our 3:30 check-in time. Since Sissinghurst belonged to Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, it seemed appropriate that we while away a few hours at her ancestral home of Knole which is conveniently located between the motorway and Sissinghurst.

When we arrived at Knole, I could not have been happier. The weather was gorgeously in the mid-sixties and the air felt so fresh, especially after flying all night. The sight of the house itself was like a calming tonic after the hour-long drive from Heathrow. Nothing unpleasant happened on the way, but I pretty much live in terror of driving in the UK. The first and last time I tried was about six years ago, and after a day of it I handed the keys to John and abdicated all driving responsibilities for the rest of the trip. It isn’t so much the other side of the road business as it is the narrowness of the traffic lanes and the propensity of giant trucks and buses and everything else to come flying at you at 70 mph on said narrow lanes. At any rate, John is much better at it than I am. I think it was because of his youth driving on the narrow, winding roads of coastal northern California that makes it more natural for him than for me who learned on the wide, straight, roads of Minnesota. So for this trip there was no question that John would be the sole driver. Despite having our GPS calling out directions, it was still pretty necessary for me to act as navigator, and so I was only marginally less stressed out sitting in the passenger seat. So when we parked the car, saw the splendid old house set in a medieval deer park and felt the fresh air on our faces, it truly did feel like we had arrived a long way a way from the stress and speed of our daily lives.

It also turned out to be a great introduction for our week-long stay at Sissinghurst. Knole was the house Vita grew up in and it meant the world to her. Being an only child, and a female, the house passed to her cousin Eddy Sackville-West, a writer, music lover, and all around aesthete. In fact, it was her dispossession that led her on the path to the ruined castle at Sissinghurst and the amazing gardens that she and Harold created there.

But, more than any of that, it was just a very pleasant place to begin to decompress.

 

 

 

 

About five years ago when I spent at least two solid hours reading the fiction shelves from A to Z at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, I came across a novel called Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach. I had never heard of her but the novel seemed right up my alley. The story of a widow who finds new life after her world famous composer husband dies. At the time I remember thinking that if I ended up liking the book, it would be insane not to have bought all the other Grumbach titles they had while I had the chance. So I put a pile of them in my already heavy basket, even though I was just on the Gs. (For more on that spectacular haul, click here.)

Unlike Chamber Music, The Pleasure of Their Company is a memoir/journal rather than a novel. It focuses on Grumbach planning her 80th birthday party and has definite shades of May Sarton’s journals. In fact, Grumach knew Sarton and mentions her a few times.

I pretty much read the entire 118 pages on the train up to New York where I was meeting one of my best friends who was flying in from the Netherlands. Anticipating seeing my dear friend of 27 years and the fact that I always get a little wistful and contemplative when I take the train north, I was in the perfect mood for Grumbach’s journal. (I am a northern boy to the core and have a somewhat odd predilection for faded industrial urban areas. I don’t like the trash one sometimes sees out the window, but as the train moves north of Baltimore it stops feeling like DC and starts feeling like vacation, and the past. Small towns with that once had small industries. Sleepy little towns with freshly mowed grass flanking old, modest, brick warehouses. Empty tarmac that looks like grey carpet waiting for a kid with a bike. Viaducts and underpasses. I even find chain link fence romantic. Not great, tall, sections of it used for security, but the kind that might be lined with decades-old peonies or rhubarb separating some old lady’s house from her neighbor.)

So what does this have to do with Doris Grumbach? Not much. It’s just to say that I was in the right kind of mood to read the retrospective musings of a bookish 80-year old planning a party in Maine. It’s full of quiet observations, unpretentious name dropping, glimpses of her reading life (Jim Crace and Penelope Fitzgerald), and event planner-like OCD about her party.

I particularly appreciated her discussion of slow reading. I like the idea that old age can bring more patience rather than less.

In the years before the party I was slowly shedding my old habit of speed reading…I read slowly, savoring the good prose and the artful development of the story. I resolved in the future to read only such books as would demand that I abandon my lifelong bad habit of hasty reading. Slow is beautiful would be my directive.

She might have had more of an interest in reading “important” books more than I do, but I am drawn to the freedom of not feeling like I am in a reading race. It doesn’t bother me one bit that by this time last year I had read 54 books and this year I am only at 17. Grumbach’s focus on quality over quantity is also spilling over into her writing. She quotes Primo Levi: ” Distillation is beautiful.” which gets her thinking:

I thought of the reduction Willa Cather must have exercised when she was writing A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy, surely among the best of her works, condensed, short, and so wholly effective. I remembered Jeannete Haien’s fine novella, The All of It, her first and most perfect book, May Sarton’s very short, As We Are Now, of all her may novels (to my mind) the best, and James Crace’s The Gift of Stones.

I especially concur with her assessment of As We Are Now, and think of how brilliantly some slim volumes can pack in outsized emotional punch and epic stories in so few pages. Novella-length fiction that makes you wonder why anyone needs 200 pages. Books like As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Of course I’m also the guy who loves Trollope so take that with a grain of salt.

I sense that not all of Grumbach’s work would be this pleasing to me. I gave up on one novel she wrote about Hollywood. But, Chamber Music is a wonderful novel (and one I talk about on a recent episode of Reading Envy) and The Pleasure of Their Company will scratch your itch for thought literary memoir.