A Queer Inheritance – Michael Hall (1)

In 2004 the garden historian Tim Richardson wrote that ‘Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst was a tumbledown garden where plants encroached from every side, whereas the National Trust’s Sissinghurst is a manicured visitor attraction. It is a travesty of the original.’90 Eventually a slow reorientation back to the ‘romantic effusiveness’ that Vita and Harold loved was begun. This was confirmed in 2015 by the appointment of the garden designer Dan Pearson as consultant to Troy Scott Smith, head gardener since 2013, with a brief to ‘re-Vita-lize the garden.91 The desire for greater sensitivity towards the ideals of Sissinghurst’s creators was also a consequence of the fact that they were famous in a way that they had not been before the publication of Portrait of a Marriage in 1973.

Many people were shocked by the book’s ­‐ revelations, in part because of distaste for homosexuality – Lord Sackville wrote to Nigel Nicolson from Knole that his feelings of affection and admiration for his cousin Vita ‘have been tarnished by your book’.92 It was consistent with such attitudes that what might be called the horticultural repression of Sissinghurst in the last quarter of the twentieth century had the effect of an attempt to keep the garden in the closet.

A subtler challenge is the quality of enclosure and refuge that forms another part of the garden’s queer identity. This is something that successors far more sympathetic to Vita and Harold than was Thomas have sometimes struggled with. Following Nigel Nicolson’s death in 2004, his son, Adam, inherited the right to live at Sissinghurst. Regretting the way that the estate had ceased to be farmed in the traditional way, he encouraged its agricultural revival, partly with the intention that its produce might supply the garden’s cafe and restaurant.93 This chimed with the way that the National Trust was encouraging visitors to explore the wider estate in order to relieve pressure on the garden.

The enclosed quality of Sissinghurst has not always been to its horticultural benefit.

Let us begin this queer tour of the National Trust in a garden. When he died at his home in Barbados in 1978 the celebrated artist and theatre designer Oliver Messel asked for his ashes to be buried at his childhood home, Nymans in Sussex, together with those of his life partner, Vagn Riis- Hansen, who had died six years before.1 The estate had been bequeathed to the National Trust by Messel’s father, Leonard, in 1953, but the house was lived in by Oliver’s sister, Anne, Countess of Rosse.

Having obeyed his wish, she commissioned a monument to her brother, to whom she had been very close. Placed in the Wall Garden, it consists of a stone classical urn, which she bought for the purpose, set on a plinth made from old cut stones found on the estate, into which the name ‘Oliver’ was carved. In 2011 the artist Matt Smith created an installation at Nymans as part of ‘Unravelling the National Trust’, a programme of curatorial interventions in three of its historic houses, two of which related to men who had lived outside heterosexual norms.

Smith dressed a Roman sculpture of a nude young man – part of the house’s collection – with a camp reimagining of a Highlander costume that Messel had designed for the dancer Sergei Lifar and then adapted for his own use as fancy dress. Noting that the 2007 guidebook to Nymans said nothing about Riis-Hansen, despite providing details about Anne Rosse’s two marriages, Smith wrote that he hoped the installation could ‘speak to the silence about Oliver and Vagn’s relationship that currently existed at the property’.2 He was successful: the family tree provided for visitors to Nymans was altered to include Riis-Hansen as Messel’s partner.

This emphasised the anomaly that only Messel’s name appeared on the monument in the Wall Garden, although both men’s ashes were buried there. In 2023 this was at last made good when the name ‘Vagn’ was added by the stone-carver Gary Churchman, who remarked that he found the task ‘poignant’ since he was himself in a same-sex relationship.3 To that might be added the fact that the monument was designed by a gay man, Christopher Hobbs (1941–2024), who created the sets for many of Derek Jarman’s films, including his queer masterpiece Sebastiane (1976).

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

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• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 465
• Language: English (en)

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