Vita Sackville-West, 1892 - 1962

 Vita Sackville-West was born at Knole, her family's castle in Kent, England (1892). She grew up in an incredibly wealthy family, but she never got along with her mother, who was the illegitimate daughter of a famous Spanish dancer. Sackville-West said, "I used to be taken to [mother's] room to be 'passed' before going down to luncheon on party days ... and I was always wrong and miserable, so that parties used to blacken my summer."

Sackville-West spent most of her childhood wandering around her family's huge house, which had 52 staircases and 365 rooms. She began to write, and by the time she was 18, she had written eight novels and five plays.

She married for convenience and she said, "[I became] the correct and adoring wife of the brilliant young diplomat." But it turned out that both she and her husband were homosexual, so while they remained married good friends for the rest of their lives, they each had many affairs.

Around 1918, Sackville-West began going out in public dressed as a man. The first time she ever put on men's pants she said, "I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over the gates. I felt like a schoolboy." She went on to have several affairs with women, most famously with Virginia Woolf. She inspired Woolf's novel Orlando, about a character who lives for centuries as both a man and a woman. It was Woolf who published Sackville-West's novel The Edwardians (1930), which became a big best seller.

She went on to write many more novels, as well as plays, poetry, and biographies, but she's also remembered as one of the great gardening writers of all time. In the 1930s, she and her husband spent years restoring a castle estate called Sissinghurst that had fallen to ruin. Sackville-West grew to love the country, spent much of her time working on the garden, and she began contributing a weekly gardening column to the London Observer. She kept it up almost 15 years. At the time, gardening was considered a masculine hobby, and most members of the British upper class employed gardeners to do all the actual work. But Vita Sackville-West wrote about the joys of digging around in the dirt, pulling weeds, and arranging the flowers herself. She persuaded many people to start their own gardens, and she helped start many gardening trends, including single-color gardens, the incorporation of wildflowers, and the planting of climbing roses at the base of apple trees.

Vita Sackville-West thought of her gardening column as insignificant compared to the rest of her writing until, in 1954, she was awarded a medal by the Royal Horticultural Society. She wrote of the award to her husband: "I was rather pleased but even more astonished. It is all due to those beastly little Observer articles... Haven't I always said that one got rewarded for the things that one least esteemed?"

Vita Sackville-West said, "I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live."


All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn,
Daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her home
No longer know her step on the upland tracks forlorn
Where she was wont to roam.

All her hounds are dead, her beautiful hounds are dead,
That paced beside the hoofs of her high and nimble horse,
Or streaked in lean pursuit of the tawny hare that fled
Out of the yellow gorse.

All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed,
The young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand,
And the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last
Is the voice of the lonely land.

—from Orchard and Vineyard (1921)