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By Jeremy Francis
Above: The entrance range and the ‘Bagatelle’ Urns planted with Verbena. Some of the sculpture at Sissinghurst is a little kitsch to my mind, however these are serious urns.
Sissinghurst is a garden made from the ruins of a substantial Tudor house of around the time and layout of Hampton Court. Almost all of it was pulled down in the 19th Century apart from the entrance range and its handsome archway, a number of high walls, two fragments of the old house since converted into cottages, and the central tower built originally in high Tudor fashion to act as the grand entrance to the second courtyard.
The garden is small, five and one half acres. So slightly bigger than Cloudehill without its woods. The soil is difficult Wealden clay and claggy in winter, and Kent in the extreme south-east corner of England the climate is sunnier than one might expect. Sissinghurst was made by Vita Sackville-West (the plants-person) and husband Harold Nicolson (the architect) from 1931 utilizing the 16 feet high walls of the old Tudor house to make a series of garden rooms very much in the Arts and Crafts style. Both Vita and Harold were well-known in their lifetimes, he a diplomat, then a writer and radio broadcaster, and in the 1930s winning a seat in the house of Commons where he was an early supporter of Churchill. His diaries, published in three volumes in the 1960s, are very worthwhile getting hold of. Vita also was a writer both of fiction and poetry. Indeed her poem, ‘The Land’, won the Hawthorden Prize and no mean feat at all.
I suppose I became aware of this garden in the early ’70s. And I vividly remember reading Anne Scott-James’ book, ‘Sissinghurst’ enthralled. I’d come across a copy in a local bookshop and could hardly believe my luck. I was reading slowly, a few pages a sitting to spin things out, broken by strolling around the magnificent Christchurch Botanic Gardens at the height of spring.
Those several days were my introduction to serious gardening. And fifty years on there are half a dozen monographs on Sissinghurst in my library. Jane Brown’s from 1990, Tony Lord’s from 1995, several by various members of the Nicolson family including Vita, and most recently Tim Richardson’s from 2020 and perhaps the most-useful.
My first chance to visit was in 1981 and I’ve been back several times since. Partly because my wife Valerie’s family live at Hearne Bay on the Thames Estuary. Not far away and it’s a lovely drive through Kentish countryside to and fro.
One or two of Cloudehill’s features are inspired by Sissinghurst. And something I kept under my hat for years until I happened to mention it in a BC (before covid) newsletter. In this I was saying that the arches to each side of our maple court were inspired by a famous English garden, and an arch constructed as a feature in what otherwise was a bland head-height brick wall. I’d simply counted the bricks in this particular arch to figure out the best dimensions. The garden’s name was not mentioned. And out the newsletter went mid-evening Melbourne time, and two minutes later an email popped back from people who two minutes earlier had been wandering into Sissinghurst’s white garden under this handsome arch, and at that precise moment their phone had gone ‘ding’, and looking at the photo in the newsletter I’d sent them they could not help but notice the resemblance between the Cloudehill archway and the one they were standing under.
The following are all photographs taken July 1 of 2024.
Above: The entrance courtyard with Irish yews leading to the tower. What would Sissinghurst be without its tower? Harold Nicolson, as he laid out the garden in the early 1930s did a fine job in a series of spaces with almost no right angles. It’s a shame visitors are blocking the view through the tower. If they had moved to the side, one would see that the sculpture on the far boundary, acting as an ‘eye-catcher’, is perfectly in line with this axis. Conversely, turning around one cannot help but notice that the previous archway, the one in the entrance range we have just walked through, is skewwhiff to the main axis by at least 15 degrees. Poor old Harold had the to deal with this everywhere and, in his diaries, complains mightily.
Above: The new Delos garden with the Priest’s cottage to the rear. Designed and planted by Dan Pearson in 2019/20 and still filling in. It contrasts very much with the rest of Sissinghurst and has attracted criticism. However, I find it seriously intriguing and cannot wait to see how it matures.
Above: Delos and the Priest’s House.
Above: The wall between Delos and the purple border with the tower behind.
Above: The mood Pearson was after, a broken wall with (I think) Briza major, a pretty grassy weed throughout much of Mediterranean-climate Australia.
Above: A euphorbia enjoying the heat bouncing from the rocks.
Above: Greek ‘mountain tea’, Sideritis syriaca, doing nicely.
Above: Myself and head gardener Troy Scott Smith comparing notes.
I first met Troy when over several days he was visiting Cloudehill more than 20 years ago. He introduced himself, then was telling me of working at Sissinghurst (he was head gardener at another National Trust Garden at the time, ‘The Courts’, in Wiltshire, and was later head gardener at Bodnant in Wales) and I asked him when that had been, and he’d replied “the early ’90s”, and I had said, “So you will be in the back of Tony Lord’s book pushing something heavy” to which he gave me a startled look. Arriving home that evening, I pulled out my (often-consulted) copy, to spot Troy leaning on a dirty great green lawn mower. To make up, Valerie and I invited him to a meal the following evening where he told us of his adventures gardening with the National Trust. I asked eventually what his grand ambition might be. And he’d replied, “To go back to Sissinghurst as head Gardener.”
Valerie and I looked at one another without saying a word. The tradition had been Sissinghurst’s head gardener should always be female. Something of an impediment one might think, however, a few years on and there he was, traditions in ruins and Troy with the gig.
Last July Troy was telling me of big changes in the garden since we last visited. For one, a new potager (featured below) to supply the restaurant. And paths to the lake and around the boundaries of Sissinghurst Farm for visitors to explore. And also important moves towards sustainability. There has been no irrigation during dry spells for three years now. Which, I might say, makes for a more open look and will need adjusting to. The gardeners have to find plants able to withstand summer dry spells which are surprisingly common in Kent. Troy was also saying he and Fergus Garrett from Great Dixter, 45 minutes down the road, chat weekly at least, figuring things out. So good to hear. And mildly surprising, Great Dixter being a private foundation while Sissinghurst the jewel in the crown of the English National Trust gardens.
Above: The purple border at the north end of the tower courtyard. One of my favorite parts of the garden.
Above: And another general shot of the purple border. I suspect there is much less purple than in years gone by, though also think this is for the best. I remember it from the 1980s as somberly magnificent. The planting now seems much lighter.
Above: And the same border with a Salvia nemorosa form and Geranium psilostemon.
Above: Knautia atropurpurea and another Salvia nemorosa form.
Above: One of the cow parsleys with an intensely purple poppy. Simply magical, but I do not think this combination would have made it into Sissinghurst previous to Troy Scott Smith taking over as head gardener.
Above: The end of the rose garden with a classic Lutyens bench and Clematis ‘Perle D’Azure’ on the wall. For some perverse reason this lovely clematis is difficult to propagate. On the strength of seeing Perle D’Azure at Sissinghust, I once asked for one from the old (now-closed) Chandlers Nursery in the Basin, and was told by their head propagator he had taken 500 cuttings from their old plant at the beginning of the season, of which two had grown and I was welcome to both for free. And, he said in great disgust, he was thinking of taking to the mother plant with a mattock.
One of my two plants promptly died, however, 25 years later the other one is happily growing beside one of our Yokohama maples. In fact has snuck across from its railings and throws out the occasional soft jacaranda-blue flower atop this tree.
Above: A view back into the rose garden from the raised dais.
Above: Last flowers on the old gallica rose, Tuscany Superb. In 1981 one of the ‘plant combinations’ prominent in the border on the north side of the rose garden was the filigree-silver Senecio vira vira, Pennisetum villosum with its creamy bottle brush seed heads and (staying with the old name, Sedum Autmn Joy, with cauliflower formation dusty-pink turning coppery-red flowers. In 1988 I was hunting down all these plants in English nurseries to take them back to Western Australia. I guess this combination was hit upon by Sybille Kreutzberger and Pamela Schwerdt, the head gardeners at Sissinghurst from Vita’s time in 1959 through to when they retired in 1991.
Above: The lime walk.
Above: The south cottage garden. Golden achillea, orange Hemerocallis, Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, and Verbascums to the rear.
Above: Again the cottage garden with red salvia (a micropylla form?) yellow bidens, opium poppies and Verbascum.
Above: The nuttery at the end of the lime walk complete with a sylvan god.
Above: The moat walk. The god at the end is the ‘eyecatcher’ I mentioned earlier for anyone walking into the garden and admiring the view into the orchard.
Above: The moat.
Above: Nigel Nicolson’s studio, built in 1969 as a memorial to Harold.
Above: Vita’s herb garden. For some odd reason it’s a long way from the kitchen.
Above: The tower from the orchard. Originally these trees were planted with climbing roses which were lovely, however, eventually throttled them. These trees are all new.
Above: The white garden with the tower to the rear. The white garden was the last of Sissinghurst’s gardens to be planted out and in the years after WW2.
Above: The white garden with the priest’s cottage behind. Famously Vita wrote of this garden before work commenced, imagining a fall of snow and white owl sweeping over the emerging plants.
Above: Rosa mulliganii and its last blossoms on the frame central to the white garden. Nigel Nicolson designed this using half a dozen paper clips after the original four almonds collapsed under the weight of this hefty rose. And it’s a pretty good job I reckon.
Above: Sissinghurst’s potager. A serious affair and meant to supply the needs of the restaurant. It is amazing how big a potager must be to achieve this.
Above: Everything according to the most up-to-date principles.
Above: The standard of gardening at Sissinghurst is awe-inspiring.
Above: The lake below the garden. Paths have been made around many of the surrounding fields and nowadays one can spend hours exploring.
Above: Views from the tower. And here we have Delos.
Above: The purple border. Delos over the wall. Very nice to have 16 feet tall 400 year old Tudor brick walls as backdrop to one’s border.
Above: Looking back to the entrance to Sissinghurst from the tower. Notice the odd angle the paved path makes as it passes under the arch.
Above: The west end of the rose garden showing the curved Powys wall constructed in the 1930s.
Above: The rondel. One of the most brilliant uses of yew I know of. And, again, something providing a degree of inspiration for Cloudehill.
Harold, as he was designing Sissinghurst, wrote of the usefulness of incorporating ‘expectation and surprise’ into the layout of one’s garden. Something which his rondel garden exemplifies. For much of the axis from the rondel to the centre of the garden, the second courtyard, all one can see are great architectural blocks of neatly-clipped yew. Then as one walks in, roses erupt everywhere.
Above: The south cottage garden.
Above: The orchard. One of Vita Sackville-West’s best pieces of writing is on scything the late-summer grass under these trees one evening during WW2 and noticing fallen apples by the sound of the blade slicing through.
Above: View over the orchard to the ‘Weald of Kent’.
Above: The white garden, the last flowers on Rosa mulliganii.
Above: The south turret.