Day 267: English Bazaar

Sissinghurst is unphotographable. 
Have a picture of the beautiful Weald of Kent. 

Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West's glorious fairy-tale garden complete with tower and moat.  It's part of the fabric of my childhood, buried deep in the Kentish Weald only a couple of miles from where I went to school.  I've lost track of how many times I've visited.  Its beauty is much-photographed, but impossible to capture on film.  It has to be experienced first-hand.  The scent.  Sweet with roses and lavender and figs, but with a haunting herbal undertow.  Smoky and bitter and compelling.  The most perfect grass - springy, velvety green.  Tawny Elizabethan brickwork, mellow and warm.  Bees humming gently and pottering contentedly.    

And the planting.  Everything spills and tumbles in soft drifts of muted colour.  No serried ranks or harsh tones here.  The atmosphere is unique.  Deeply English, but also exotic. 

Which makes total sense, when you read this - Vita writing about old roses:-

I remember that many years ago, in the bazaars of Constantinople, we used sometimes to spend a fabulous, Arabian-tale of an afternoon, not propped on banks of amaranth and moly, but on divans and cushions in the warehouse of a great carpet merchant, sipping sweet-thick Turkish coffee from cups with filigree containers, while the treasures of his collection were rolled out at our feet by innumerable servitors, picturesque in their blue blouses, broad red sashes, and baggy blue trousers.

But what has all this to do, you may ask, with the old roses which are the subject of Mr. Graham Thomas’s book? Perhaps not so very far removed. Mr. Thomas swept me quite unexpectedly back to those dusky mysterious hours in an Oriental storehouse when the rugs and carpets of Isfahan and Bokhara and Samarkand were unrolled in their dim but sumptuous colouring and richness of texture for our slow delight. Rich they were, ripe as a fig broken open, soft as a ripened peach, freckled as an apricot, coral as a pomegranate, bloomy as a bunch of grapes. It is of these that the old roses remind me.

It's right there in those words.  That atmosphere of magic carpet which is so distinct in these gardens. 

Like a bloodhound I track the fantastic herbal smell to a small, white-flowered plant.  Hyssop.  Used in Ancient Greece for cleaning sacred places.  I cannot stop sniffing it. 

A small plant accompanies me home in the car.  I hope it will survive the cats, the pigeons and the slugs.  As I drive the car is filled with scent.  Car becomes magic carpet.