Even in the beginning, in 1930 when my grandparents first started to make the garden at Sissinghurst, they saw it as a kind of refuge: tucked away down its long lane, buried in the ancient Saxon forest of the Weald and surrounded by its own thick pelt of orchards and hop gardens, woods and pastures. In the course of its making, from that first decade and into the 1940s, as the world drifted into a threatening and polarised condition, and eventually to war, that sense of removal became ever more central to its meaning. Sissinghurst, in its heart, is a kind of secret set away from the rest of the world.
Its role in the lives of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and increasingly in the lives of the many others who came to see it and stay there, to love it, was to be distinct from the everyday. People often call it a romantic garden, a poet’s garden, a ‘rose-tinted spectacle’, and – more than any horticultural excellence or the precision mowing of a lawn or hedge – that disconnection from a mundane actuality is what matters about it.
Perhaps because of that feeling for disconnectedness, it has all the qualities of a work of art, above all a complete sense of conviction. Even in its many and various parts, there is a continuity of atmosphere, a Sissinghurstness which is dependent on a set of related and even contradictory qualities that are applied in every corner.
First, there is the enduring resonance of – and canny response to – the place’s deep historical roots. In the late 1560s, a party-palace for Elizabeth and her court to enjoy some summer days hunting in the park and dancing at night had been built here by a young courtier, rich with money that his brutal lawyer father had squirrelled away. By 1930, that huge, multi-courtyarded Renaissance palace had fallen apart until only a few fragments remained: a tower, a cottage or two, some bruised and mended walls, the long entrance range.
Fragmentary survival is an invitation to poetry, and it is among these elements of a pretty and elegant past that Vita and Harold made their double contribution. Quite conventionally, he planned and she planted. He sought alignments among the ruins and created the system of long enfilades that define the garden, crossing it from north to south and east to west, each of them giving on to a succession of enclosed and distinctly defined spaces.
It is not a complicated idea, borrowed from the kind of classical houses he loved, but it allows a drama to unfold for anyone walking here: again and again, a narrow entrance gives on to a new garden, in each of which Vita’s painterly vision springs its sudden drama on you – in colour, in form, giving the visitor what my father always liked to call ‘delighted surprise’.
These are the ingredients: a Grand Meaulnes sense of apartness; a residual and broken antiquity; an almost subliminal sense of good order, of a place well set out; and, as a final element, an uncompromising fullness. Every corner must be full. No bare earth must show. The hedged and walled container of each garden, defined by colour or theme – white or hot or purple or Greek or old roses – must overbrim. Nothing in the party must seem to stint. ‘Fine carelessness’ was a phrase Vita liked to use. In the way that Renaissance poets and courtiers used to stand for their portraits with an air of sprezzatura – a self-discipline and self-assurance so complete that no stiffness could be discerned in them – a garden should look effortlessly beautiful. Or perhaps more like, as Vita once wrote, a rug merchant’s shop in Isfahan, after he has spent most of the morning bringing out from his deepest recesses the lushest carpets he knows, so that mounds of colour and life spread from one wall to the other, in a profusion of riches that represent the marvellousness of the world he could imagine.
Of course, there are lawns and the wide, rough open space of an orchard bordered by the Medieval moat. They are the rice that any curry needs. And the garden at every turn gives on to the widths of the Weald, the ‘dark blue and gold’ of the woods and cornfields that Vita loved as much as the garden itself. But the heart of Sissinghurst is not in that clarity or openness. People have often mistaken it for a grand country house, but it isn’t one really. It is more like a garden in a wreck, full of that sense of melancholy, or at least a melancholy interleaved with a feeling of what place transient beauty can hold in a largely terrible world. It is a dreamscape, a place of longing, whose purpose is to stand outside time and history.
When Vita died in 1962, my parents moved in, and my sisters and I grew up there as children. It seemed at the time, inevitably I guess, entirely normal. For me the garden was fun because I could bike down through the Tudor arch at the entrance, across the lawn to the rose garden, swerve right at the yew-lined Rondel then left to the Spring Garden, through the Nuttery, out of the herb-garden gate, sharp right into the lake field, down to the track through the wood, before coming back up to the house, to start it all again. My grandfather’s geometries, my grandmother’s slightly annoying planting – a horrible spiky acanthus on one corner – the wonderful Elizabethan landscape and the wider beauties of the Weald all perfect for an entire seven-year-old’s morning of racing against the clock.
Only later, of course, helped by being there with others, could I come to see this place for what it was, as a reservoir of beauty. The time to be there is first thing in the morning or last thing as it closes on a summer evening, the visitors largely gone, the walls and the brick steps below the tower still warm from the day, and the colour thickening in the dusk, even as the whites of the White Garden start to float free of their tethers and the whole place becomes a strange disembodied suggestion of a garden in which a mild blue whiteness is dabbed here and there in the dark.
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Biddenden Rd, near Cranbrook, Kent TN17 2AB. Details: nationaltrust.org.uk
A version of this appeared in the July 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
