The Garden was published by Michael Joseph in 1946. It is the companion poem to The Land — written twenty years later, in the same formal mode (four seasonal sections, rhyming couplets and blank verse) but celebrating gardening rather than farming. Where The Land honored the worker in the fields, The Garden honors the gardener-artist — the person who creates beauty from living material.
The poem is inseparable from Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson were creating during the years the poem was written. Sissinghurst would become the most visited garden in England — its famous white garden, its rose garden, its spring garden — and The Garden can be read as a verbal blueprint for what was simultaneously being achieved in soil and plant. The poem describes the same acts of design, planting, and cultivation that were being performed in the real garden outside the tower where Vita wrote.
The poem is more personal than The Land: where the earlier work maintained a certain pastoral objectivity, The Garden is openly a record of one woman’s passion for making beauty from nature. The descriptions of specific plants — old roses, irises, spring bulbs — are written with the expertise of someone who has grown them for decades, and the aesthetic arguments about garden design reflect genuine artistic convictions.
Collecting The Garden
First edition (Michael Joseph, London, 1946): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75