Aristocrat, literary celebrity, ‘Rose Queen’, devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast – Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward.

She is perhaps best known as the creator of England’s most-visited gardens, at Sissinghurst Castle. She was also an award-winning poet, a best-selling novelist, a biographer, travel writer and a journalist with a huge and devoted following – a prolific and accomplished writer.

Yet behind the public mask of her many achievements, another more complicated, often troubled Vita lay.

Biographer Matthew Dennison reveals a renegade, brave and charismatic woman; often misunderstood. From a lonely childhood of immense privilege to a celebrated and affectionate marriage which was mutually ‘open’ and strewn with passionate affairs by both husband and wife (hers most famously with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis), Dennison traces the triumphs and contradictions of Vita’s extraordinary life, including her literary successes and disappointments, and of course her creation of the famous Sissinghurst gardens.

His presentation begins at 6:30 p.m. April 22, 2015, in the Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London, England. Tickets are £20.