Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson:
(née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962).
Usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.
Apart from the pleasures of gardening, November has beauty of its own. The Saxons called it wind-month, for then the fishermen drew up their boats and abandoned fishing till the spring. It was called the slaughter-month, too, when pigs and cattle were salted down for preservation throughout the winter.
It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June.
April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.
The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February. At least we notice that the days are getting longer.
