While they waited for the electric kettle to sing, she found mugs and Jo puttered about the small space, pulling books off shelves distractedly, then shoving them back. “You got on with Terence, I gather?” Imogen said. “Went over all those plant lists I gave you?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Imogen had expected rather more; Ter reported that the American was put off by the discipline of the bedding trials. Had said something about the value of propagating disorder rather than perfection. Imogen had muttered to herself when she heard this; Jo sodding Bellamy didn’t need to justify her job to the National Trust, thank you very much, she wasn’t charged with bringing immortality to an aging icon.
The kettle sang.
Imogen poured, and handed a mug to Jo.
“I’ve been thinking about the war years,” the American said.
“The war years? You mean — the Second World War?”
“Exactly. What was it like here then?”
Imogen rested her broad bottom against the edge of her desk, puzzled. “I don’t know. Bombs, I think. Kent was a highway for the Luftwaffe, straight across the Channel from Paris. What part of the war do you mean, exactly?”
Jo shrugged. “I know the Nicolsons stayed here for most of it. Or Vita did. Harold was up in London, weekdays. I’ve read the biographies.”
“Right,” Imogen said briskly. “But you’re interested in the garden. Not the family.”
“True.” Jo met her gaze directly. “And the family made the garden. The war should have killed it. How did they manage, with everybody fighting the Germans, and no supplies or anything, and air raids every other minute?”
“I suppose a lot was… put on hold.” Imogen took a gulp of tea. “Your own bit’s an example of that. Vita came up with the idea for the White Garden during the war. But it wasn’t possible to actually make the thing for years after. Like you say — no labor, no plants, no money. They were more interested in begging petrol than peonies in those years.”
“Are there any records? From the gardeners — if there were any — who tended Sissinghurst then?”
Imogen frowned; there was a strange glitter to Jo Bellamy’s eyes. The woman’s on something, she thought. She’s barmy. “I can’t see why it matters! The White Garden didn’t exist.”
“I just need to know.” Jo set down her mug and folded her arms protectively across her chest. “Okay, it has nothing to do with why I’m here. But my grandfather was from Kent — he was in the war.…I’ve started to wonder what happened here.”
Imogen sighed, and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.
“I’m two Heads removed from Pam and Sibylle, who made Sissinghurst what it is. The Mädchen, Vita called them. They spent nearly forty years here after Jack Vass — the only other real gardener Sissinghurst ever had. He started during the war, then joined up and returned to Sissinghurst when the fighting was over. Vass was quite a local sensation — he’d worked at Cliveden before us, and escaped from a German POW camp or something — but he went Communist, and Vita was scared. So she fired him.”
“There are no records from those years?” Something in Jo had flickered and gone out as Imogen was talking.
“Not much.” She straightened, intrigued despite her growing mistrust. “Look — it’s raining. I’ve done all I can do here. Why don’t we have a rummage through the stores?”
IMOGEN LED JO THROUGH THE RAIN TO THE BRICK-WALLED nursery west of the Rose Garden, where sheds and glasshouses and cold frames and plunge beds were scattered with a haphazard air, as if they had sprung up over successive decades, as indeed they had. Jo had toured the area previously, and she recognized that the crux of Sissinghurst’s success was the range of horticultural techniques Imogen commanded beneath the low-slung roofs of the various sheds. The magnificence of the carefully tended beds — all that most visitors saw of the garden — was inconceivable without the regimented cycles of propagation, potting, cold frame, and division that went on, with only the briefest of pauses in spring planting season, throughout the year.
“This used to be Harold and Vita’s kitchen garden,” Imogen tossed over her shoulder as she bypassed the Cambridge glasshouse and made for a small tool shed. “Dead useful during the war, of course, but neglected once the two of them passed on. Here we are — mind your head — this is a sad excuse for a lumber room, but we’ve been forced to make do.”
It was a ramshackle wooden building, airless and poorly lit, with a strong suggestion of spiders and other unmentionables lurking in the corners. A wall of boxes, staking materials, and pruning ladders rose before them, cheek-by-jowl with hedge-trimming templates and folded hessian squares. A strong smell of dirt and damp wafted to the nose. Imogen cursed inwardly; surely the place was swept when the boxes were shifted from the old cow barn? But who would expect cleanliness in a tool shed, after all? Not even an American could be so daft.
“This isn’t the working tool shed, you understand,” she told Jo. “Just a place for overflow. Now that The Family have gone all gaga over organic farming we’ve been forced to bid for space.”
“Wasn’t there always a farm?”
“Well, yes,” Imogen said, “but it was nothing to do with the Trust. The fields were leased, time out of mind, to the same handful of families. Just lately the whole thing’s shifted — come under the aegis of the Trust — and the new people snatched up the old outbuildings we’d come to think of as ours. The cow barn, for instance.”
Jo glanced around the shed, eyes narrowed against the dusk. “Didn’t Vita keep cows?”
“She kept any number of things that couldn’t be sustained.” Imogen’s tone was grudging. “Sheep. Hop fields. The Trust have seen their way clear to pigs.”
“You’re not enthusiastic.”
“Pigs, I ask you! Did they give any thought to how all this clutter looks from the garden? Much less smells? Sissinghurst is a cultural gem! With the odor of cow dung wafting over the Rose Garden!”
“I take it the project is recent?”
Imogen glowered with resentment. “Oh, it’s new all right. That’s why everybody’s so keen! We’re a test case for the National bloody Trust. We’re to prove whether an integrated landscape in balance between cultivation and pleasure can be a self-sustaining prospect. And without spraying, no less. There was even a BBC special on the telly, waxing lyric about Vita’s feeling for the land, when she was the first person to crow about the pleasures of killing weeds with a healthy tot of DDT. Camera crews trudging through the muck down by Hammer Brook and swooning over the frog spawn. Try juggling all that internal politics with hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, and see where it puts you.”
“Thigh-high in manure,” Jo said, with pardonable amusement. “But you’re not responsible for the farm?”
“No,” Imogen admitted. “I’ve nothing to do with it, really. There’s a separate head, separate staff, separate… world, really… it’s just — ” She paused, searching for the right words. “I get the concept. I do. Grow the food here that we sell to the people who visit. But the visitors come because of the garden. Not the pigs. You know what I mean? I just hope the Trust don’t lose sight of that.”
“It’s not like they value the garden less because they’ve undertaken organic farming, is it?” Jo asked mildly. “Doesn’t the farm just add to the whole picture?”
“At some cost,” Imogen retorted tartly. “You understand that Trust houses are forced to support themselves? That we’re not all the recipients of boundless government largesse? Here at Sissinghurst we’ve a fixed pool of income — mainly derived from ticket sales to the garden — that’s expected to pay all our salaries and the Castle maintenance and all the expense of keeping the horticultural show going — and we’ve been lucky to earn a surplus over the years. What if the hedges suddenly die or all the glasshouses fall in? Now it’s my funds that’re being tapped for the farm project. I wish The Family had never come up with the idea. You don’t have to deal with resident families at your historic houses in the States, do you?”