Post by Kate Forsyth

The LGBTQ+ icon, poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West died #onthisday - 2 June 1962, at the age of 70, and so it's the perfect day to celebrate her fascinating life and work.  Born into an aristocratic family, she grew up at the 600-year-old English manor house at Knole Park. She loved Knole passionately, but was not permitted to inherit because she was a girl. This caused her much heartache. She was 25 years old when her first book, Poems of West and East, was published in 1917. She became a well-known figure in the London literary scene, easily recognisable because of her androgynous style, wearing breeches and velvet riding coats with long strands of priceless pearls. However, Vita is most famous for her passionate affair with Virginia Woolf, her unconventional open marriage to gay diplomat Sir Harold Nicholson, and her famous white garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, which I wish was mine. “I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden," she wrote. "This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it … All the same, I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight — the pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow.” I have seen the white garden in spring, with snowdrops in clusters under bare trees, and I have seen it in summer, hung with fragrant white roses and great sheafs of lilies.  This October I am returning to see it in autumn. I am hoping for the last delicate wind flowers, silvery lambs' ears and cobweb-strung seeds heads - a ghostly garden, haunted by the memory of Vita who died here. Wish you could come? Then join me on my #secretgardensliterarytour and I'll take you there! We'll read her words together and talk about them as we explore this most enchanting of literary gardens. READ MORE: https://lnkd.in/gcgNa-Ge #betterreadtours #kateforsythtours #secretgardenstour #sissinghurst