Sissinghurst

The last major cleanup after the house sale is finally done and we are taking a few days off for a visit to Rye, stopping at Sissinghurst along the way. Somehow it looks as if we have chosen one of the hottest weeks in the year! Never mind, we plan to explore in the mornings and watch Wimbledon in the afternoons – can’t be bad! We enjoyed our days in Sandwich and we looking forward to the trip.

I was driving so no pictures of the countryside between London and Sissinghurst, but I was told it is looking lush. It had been many years since we were last there and I was looking forward to seeing it again.

Sissinghurst

Apparently the site was once a Saxon pig farm, but the current buildings date back to Tudor times. Sir John Baker built a house for his daughter who married Thomas Sackville, the 1st Earl of Dorset,¹ and a distant ancestor of Vita Sackville-West. In the Seven-Years War the buildings were a prison, and later a workhouse, but the buildings declined steadily. Then, in 1930, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson bought the property and set about creating a garden where there was none.²

Plan of the garden at Sissinghurst

Garden plan at Sissinghurst: https://sissinghurstcastle.wordpress.com/sissinghurst-garden-map/

White Garden at Sissinghurst

There are ten ‘garden rooms’ at Sissinghurst and we started in the White Garden. The only colours allowed here are white, green, grey and silver, which should produce a shimmering effect. But today the garden looked rather dull and drab. Should they address the plants being used? Or mass groups of plants for greater effect? The roses were over and perhaps this is not the best time of year for this particular part of the garden.

Delos Garden

In 1935, Vita and Harold visited Delos in Greece. They loved the island and wanted to recreate the feel of it at Sissinghurst, but apparently they never quite managed it. In 2018, the Head Gardener, Troy Smith Scott, invited Dan Pearson to work with his team in re-imagining the garden. Around 6,000 Mediterranean-type plants were established and the garden opened to the public in 2021.

I have never been to Delos, so don’t know if this is ‘genuine’, but as a garden it is super. The plants were flourishing in the heat and it hung together as a design.

View across the Delos Garden in Sissinghurst

Planting in the Delos Garden in Sissinghurst

The Rose Garden

The roses were mainly over when we visited, but there was a wonderful wall ofd clematis at one end of the garden.

Cottage Garden

The Cottage Garden was a blaze of bold oranges, reds and yellows and really lovely. but again I wondered if bigger blocks of colour would make it even more dramatic.