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A controversial garden makeover at Sissinghurst
Back in 2008 I wrote an article suggesting that the garden at Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent, famously the creation of poet and garden-maker Victoria (“Vita”) Sackville-West and her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson, had rather lost its mojo.
It seemed to me that while it was being gardened at a high level, horticulturally speaking, the tone of the planting and general atmosphere of the place were a long way from anything Vita would have recognised. There was little of the romantic effusiveness, the pleasant disorder, at times shading into chaos, which this aristocratic owner, the very epitome of “shabby chic”, had carefully nurtured.
Instead, the garden was presented as a well organised, professionally run visitor attraction. It had lost its romance. Vita had vanished.
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To my astonishment, this elicited a furious reaction from a former head of gardens at the National Trust. He fired off a “green-ink letter” to the then director-general of the Trust, Dame Fiona Reynolds, stating that I was a discredit to the National Trust’s gardens advisory panel.
Fortunately I was not sacked from this job (or should we say “role”, as it was voluntary). But I was taken aback by the force of feeling.
I shouldn’t have been. Sissinghurst, more than any other garden I know, inspires extremes of emotion. There is a feeling that this is Britain’s leading garden – and so, arguably, the world’s, a status that has proven to be both a great boon and an albatross around its neck.
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The truth is that the views I expressed then were not particularly controversial. It’s just that the relentlessly celebratory tone of most garden journalism meant that no one had actually said it in print. Many if not most people in the gardens world felt something was wrong there. A 2009 television series about Sissinghurst (made by my wife, as it happens) demonstrated that the “donor family”, led by Adam Nicolson and his wife Sarah Raven, felt this way about the entire estate.
That has all changed. The fourth general manager in four years looks set to stay, and a new head gardener, Troy Scott Smith, has been appointed with the mission to “re-Vita-lise” the garden. Judging by my last visit, in June, it appears that Sissinghurst is already well on the road to recovery.
There is a new sense of fullness to important areas (notably the rose garden, because it is now understood that shrub roses are crucial to the garden) as well as evidence of a new sensitivity to atmosphere and the importance of fine detail.
Scott Smith, 44, is the key to this success. He “gets it”. As one member of the Nicolson family said to me, Vita would have thrown up her hands in dismay at the former management. But she would be throwing her arms around Scott Smith today.
As a long-standing National Trust man, he understands how the organisation functions, which helps. He was previously head gardener at Bodnant, North Wales, and before that The Courts in Holt, Wiltshire. Crucially, early in his career he spent five years as a gardener at Sissinghurst.
On visits back to the garden over the years, he admits: “There was something which just bothered me about the place, the look and the feel of it. I was very content at Bodnant but when this job was advertised I thought about it and it became quite clear to me what was wrong.
“Sissinghurst should be really intimate and romantic and immersive. A soft wash should permeate across the garden. But it had become too frigid, too processed.
Beyond the garden, some parts were too municipal in feel. Before the interview I sent a paper to the Trust setting out where some faults lay and what could be done about them.”
To the Trust’s credit, it accepted this critique and supports his plan. Certain proposed changes, such as getting rid of some of the hard paved paths and reinstating grass, or the removal of too-smart column bases, might be apparent even to the casual visitor.
But most of his interventions involve the texture and tone of the planting, which he says had become rather stale – lupins in clumps of six repeated year on year, for example, and individual plants like foxgloves placed to look as if they had self-seeded.
“The garden did not feel as if it was breathing and alive,” Scott Smith says. “In Vita’s day, hedges were cut to have character and the borders were full to overflowing.” Indeed, Vita’s stated intention was to “cram, cram, cram”.
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The irony is that the “Vita way” does not come naturally to him. He is a professionally trained gardener who likes everything to be just so. He has sympathy with his predecessors, who were working to a high level in a style in which they had been trained and with the encouragement and approval of higher-ups at the National Trust.
It’s more a case that the garden style at Sissinghurst was a reflection of the times: it became a garden of connoisseurial herbaceous-perennial horticulture in the style of Great Dixter or Beth Chatto’s garden, high water marks in the Eighties and Nineties.
But Scott Smith says that this professional distance works to his and the garden’s advantage, because Sissinghurst “demands an intellectual as well as an intuitive approach. We have to be able to articulate what we are doing to the team and the public”.
In support of this, I have a theory that an awful lot of female gardeners of a certain age subconsciously want to “be” Vita Sackville-West. Sissinghurst plays on all kinds of fantasies, not least those bound up with social class. This is patently ridiculous for someone like Scott Smith, married with two children and sporting designer stubble.
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His professionalism arguably creates a stronger sense intellectual detachment and focus for the task.
There is much work still at be done at Sissinghurst. The opening salvo of the garden, the Top Courtyard, in particular still exhibits a certain stiffness. But Scott Smith is deliberately moving slowly and carefully, aware that you cannot rush a transformation such as this.
Garden designer Dan Pearson is now working alongside him as a consultant, visiting a few times a year and acting as a sounding board and collaborator.
The proposed vision will emerge over a period of at least a decade, though already the changes are decisively affecting the atmosphere. For example, Scott Smith has increased the rose content of the garden by 40 per cent, and there are many other explicit changes in the offing.
At risk of inspiring another green-ink letter, may I suggest that something of Vita is finally being brought back to Sissinghurst?
Proposed changes
- White Garden Reorganisation of the box hedge system and replanting of parts of the garden to extend the seasonal interest. Inclusion of some non-white flowers in accordance with Vita’s original plan for “grey, green and white”.
- Rose Garden Re-laying of brick paths and reinstatement of grass in some places. A return to planting that is “rich, lavish, generous, fragrant, optimistic and romantic”, including every rose known to have been grown by Vita. Add taller companion plants including lilies, remove some ornamental grasses such as stipa and pennisetum.
- Top Courtyard More seating. Looser shape to the clipped yews.
- Purple border More flowering plants climbing on the walls. Daisies in the lawn?
- Lower Courtyard Bulking up of the box hedges so that they are stronger and thicker.
- Orchard Persevere with mown grass paths despite wear and tear. Gradual move towards a flower-meadow feel in the sward. More roses and honeysuckle in the trees. Possible removal of amelanchiers.
- Lime Walk Artificial weathering of the recently replaced pots. Gradual reduction of crocus to allow more complexity.
- Route from car park To come within the gardeners’ domain, so that visitors have a sense they have arrived at a special place from the moment they park their cars.
For further information, visit nationaltrust.org.uk