Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote became a great friend and her influence on him was strong. Of his garden in the south of France, Serre de la Madone, she complained that it was spoilt by treillage, tricks, too many tiny pots and new doors with fat babies on them. ‘There’s no design, it’s too tricky about with tiny paths and tiny rocks and tiny sitting places — it wants all simplifying and pushing out in all directions.’ Her eye for space and architecture was as good as her taste in plants.
As a gardener, Norah Lindsay was probably one of our greatest. The Long Garden at Sutton has more atmosphere in black and white than any modern glycerine-drenched, shot-at-dawn photograph. Her best legacies were the way she introduced clipped shapes of box and yew into gardens and her sense of scale and generous planting — ‘all head gardeners dote on dots,’ she said. She used painted blue wood long before Titchmarsh and her knowledge of plants was learned the hard way. By train she travelled to Hilliers to choose shrubs (‘when I die Magnolia will be written on my heart’). Although she could fill a bowl indoors with yellow broom, scarlet poppies and delphiniums and occasionally planted salmon pink gladiolus, red-hot pokers, dahlias and gazanias, what she loved best was a colour scheme based on ‘ton sur ton’. It has taken an American to recognise Norah Lindsay’s worth and Allyson Hayward has done her proud. I only had one regret: if Vita Sackville West was really a lifelong friend, as the author claims, how come we never hear of her until two years before Norah Lindsay’s death in a rather stiff letter of condolence? So many of the features at Sissinghurst have touches of Lindsay’s flair that some proof of their pooling ideas would have made the book even more fascinating.
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