{"id":253269,"date":"2026-07-13T02:42:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T23:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/a-queer-inheritance-michael-hall-1\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T02:42:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T23:42:06","slug":"a-queer-inheritance-michael-hall-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/a-queer-inheritance-michael-hall-1\/","title":{"rendered":"A Queer Inheritance – Michael Hall (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 2004 the garden historian Tim Richardson wrote that \u2018Sackville-West\u2019s Sissinghurst was a tumbledown garden where plants encroached from every side, whereas the National Trust\u2019s Sissinghurst is a manicured visitor attraction. It is a travesty of the original.\u201990 Eventually a slow reorientation back to the \u2018romantic effusiveness\u2019 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 \u2018re-Vita-lize the garden.91 The desire for greater sensitivity towards the ideals of Sissinghurst\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Many people were shocked by the book\u2019s \u00ad\u2010 revelations, in part because of distaste for homosexuality \u2013 Lord Sackville wrote to Nigel Nicolson from Knole that his feelings of affection and admiration for his cousin Vita \u2018have been tarnished by your book\u2019.92 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.<\/p>\n

A subtler challenge is the quality of enclosure and refuge that forms another part of the garden\u2019s queer identity. This is something that successors far more sympathetic to Vita and Harold than was Thomas have sometimes struggled with. Following Nigel Nicolson\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The enclosed quality of Sissinghurst has not always been to its horticultural benefit.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s father, Leonard, in 1953, but the house was lived in by Oliver\u2019s sister, Anne, Countess of Rosse.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Oliver\u2019 was carved. In 2011 the artist Matt Smith created an installation at Nymans as part of \u2018Unravelling the National Trust\u2019, a programme of curatorial interventions in three of its historic houses, two of which related to men who had lived outside heterosexual norms.<\/p>\n

Smith dressed a Roman sculpture of a nude young man \u2013 part of the house\u2019s collection \u2013 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\u2019s two marriages, Smith wrote that he hoped the installation could \u2018speak to the silence about Oliver and Vagn\u2019s relationship that currently existed at the property\u2019.2 He was successful: the family tree provided for visitors to Nymans was altered to include Riis-Hansen as Messel\u2019s partner.<\/p>\n

This emphasised the anomaly that only Messel\u2019s name appeared on the monument in the Wall Garden, although both men\u2019s ashes were buried there. In 2023 this was at last made good when the name \u2018Vagn\u2019 was added by the stone-carver Gary Churchman, who remarked that he found the task \u2018poignant\u2019 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\u20132024), who created the sets for many of Derek Jarman\u2019s films, including his queer masterpiece Sebastiane (1976).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.<\/em><\/p>\n

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