On April 3, 1928, Vita Sackville-West wrote from their home, Long Barn in Kent, to her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was working at the British Embassy in Berlin, Germany: ‘My own beloved Hadji, such a funny expedition yesterday. Dotz [Dorothy Wellesley] wanted to go and see Penn’s Rocks — you know that place near Withyham.’
After describing how the approach winds through woods full of rabbits and primroses, she continued: ‘The house, which is red brick, William and Mary, stands up on a hill… Then I went around the corner into the garden… and I got such a surprise. A glade stretched away in front of me and to the right were huge rocks, covered in moss, littered about in a wilderness of oaks and cedars… It was absolutely fantastic, a mixture of the most absurdly romantic age — added to which it has the Old Buckhurst soil of peat and silver sand. Dotz is wild about it and wants to sell Sherfield.’
Sackville-West is recording the first visit of her lover, the poet Dorothy Wellesley (Dotz was Sackville-West’s abbreviation of Dotty, as she had been known by family and friends from childhood), to the place that Wellesley would indeed buy — within a few weeks, at the same time selling her previous family home, Sherfield in Hampshire. After many years of a peripatetic, indulged and often emotionally chaotic life (she separated from, but never divorced, her husband, Lord Gerald Wellesley), funded by the considerable family fortune she inherited at a young age, Penns in the Rocks would become a stabilising influence in her life and remain the beloved home where she died in July 1956.
The features that Wellesley fell in love with at Penns in the Rocks, as it came to be known — the long approach through sloping woods; the undulating landscape that falls away from one side of the house and rises up from another, with its woods and open spaces; and, in particular, the extraordinary huge outcrops of Wealden sandstone that give the place its name — are all as evident today as they were 100 years ago. One geology expert who visited recently estimated them to be 140 million years old and they never failed to impress, not least Virginia Woolf, who was an early visitor with Sackville-West and wrote in her diary afterwards: ‘Dottie’s rocks are powdered pale greys & bright greens, they are grey as elephant backs.’
The Temple of Friendship, dedicated to Dorothy ‘Dotz’ Wellesley’s poet friends, including W. B. Yeats, a regular visitor to Penns. The grass beneath is threaded with Lent lilies.
After Wellesley’s death in 1956, Penns in the Rocks was bought by Patrick and Dione Gibson, who nurtured and developed the garden— Patrick later took the title Lord Gibson of Penn’s Rocks—with the help of their friend Lanning Roper (garden designer and regular contributor to this magazine). Today, it is home to their son Hugh and his wife, Frances, who have continued to perpetuate the quality and character the garden has enjoyed for nearly a century.
Gardening was a passion that Wellesley and Sackville-West shared and their letters and other writings clearly suggest that the two planned much of the garden at Penns in the Rocks together. Having started as a modest farmhouse, the present elegant 18th-century house was built and then extended in the 19th century by the family of William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania in America. The Penns sold the house in 1762 and there followed extensions during the 19th century. Sale particulars dated 1832 confirm that the walled garden to the east of the house was added later and that there were still farm buildings in front of the house on what is now the west lawn, which sets up today’s most expansive view with the rocks to one side.
Wellesley replaced vegetables with flowers in the walled garden, but her main additions were to the south of the house, where, beyond the walled garden, she built a swimming pool — then very fashionable — complete with a pavilion at one end and a seat designed by Edwin Lutyens at the other. In 1939, she built the Temple of Friendship perched on a rise, looking down to the house.
The temple memorialises her friendship with poets, in particular W. B. Yeats who had died earlier that year and who had been a regular visitor to Penns in the Rocks. A stone tablet in front records the names: ‘W. B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, W. J. Turner, Ruth Pitter, V Sackville West, Dorothy Wellesley.’ Friendship was not always the order of the day; next to the tablet, Wellesley added an inscription for the great love of her live, Hilda Matheson, a pioneering journalist and producer at the BBC: Hilda Matheson, Amice Amicarum; today, the inscription has been clearly scratched out.
The robinia avenue planted by Lord Gibson in the walled garden providing winter structure and early colour — including more Lent lilies, the native Narcissus pseudonarcissus ‘Lobularis’.
After a visit in May 1929, Sackville-West wrote again to her husband about the quantities of lily of the valley, which just appeared: ‘It really is not fair, there are sheets of them all over the woods.’ These lilies were originally planted by a previous occupant, but it is likely that the two women planted together what has become a remarkable late-winter feature at Penns in the Rocks, huge quantities of Lent lilies, the native British daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus ‘Lobularis’.
It would appear that the lilies were first planted in the woodland behind the Temple of Friendship and had only spread through this area by the 1960s. Since then, they have spectacularly lived up to their reputation as the best naturalising narcissus, spreading all over the slope in front of the temple, scattering across the area around the sandstone rocks and down the valley into the woods along the drive. At the time of year when trees and earth are bare and brown, their shades of soft yellow are an uplifting sight anywhere and quite exhilarating when on such a large scale as at Penns. Similar, indeed, to William Wordsworth’s ‘host of golden daffodils… ten thousand saw I at a glance/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance’.
'Winter is the best time to appreciate the surviving bones of Wellesley’s garden'
Winter is the best time of year to appreciate the surviving bones of Wellesley’s garden and the additions planned sensitively by Lord and Lady Gibson, which enhance the existing landscape without dominating it. From the west lawn, Lord Gibson (former chairman of the Financial Times, the Arts Council and the National Trust) enhanced the view in the 1960s by adding a lake with, on its far side, an Ionic temple (saved from a nunnery in north London), which peeps out from the woodland behind. On the slope in front of Wellesley’s temple, he planted two liquidambars to frame the view from the house.
Through the middle of the walled garden, he added an avenue of robinias and parallel to the swimming pool another avenue, originally flowering cherries, now white mulberry trees. These features give the garden structure through winter, but most memorable of all are the monumental eponymous rocks, with everything around them pared back and their mottled grey-brown shapes at their most impressive.
The garden of Penns in the Rocks, East Sussex, will be open for the National Garden Scheme on March 29, May 17 and July 26, and by arrangement from April to July for groups of 10 or more.