Plan s in their own right.
Priest's House The architectural historian
John Newman suggests that this building was a "viewing pavilion or lodge". Its name derives from the tradition that it was used to house a Catholic priest, the Baker family having been Catholic adherents. Sackville-West and Nicolson converted the cottage to provide accommodation for their sons, and the family kitchen and dining room. Of red brick and two storeys, Historic England suggests that the building may originally have been attached to Sir Richard Baker's 1560s house but Newman disagrees.
South Cottage This building formed the southeast corner of the courtyard enclosure buildings. It was restored by Beale & Son, builders from
Tunbridge Wells, and provided the pair with separate bedrooms, a shared sitting room, and Nicolson's writing room. His diary entry for 20 April 1933 records: "My new wing has been done. The sitting room is lovely ... My bedroom,
w.c. and bathroom are divine". Of two storeys in red brick, with an extension dating from the 1930s, South Cottage has a Grade II* listing.
Gardens Although the estate as a whole is , the gardens themselves occupy only . Gardener Sarah Raven (Adam Nicolson's wife) notes the use of the vertical dimension, as well as horizontal paths, in her planting. Assisted by the number of walls still standing from the
Tudor manor, and constructing more of her own, Sackville-West remarked "I see we are going to have heaps of wall space for climbing things." Old roses formed the centrepiece of the planting, and their history appealed to her as much as their appearance did: "there is nothing scrimpy or stingy about them. They have a generosity which is as desirable in plants as in people", and ultimately around 200 varieties were grown at Sissinghurst.
Influences Edwin Lutyens, long-time gardening partner of
Gertrude Jekyll, was a friend to both Sackville-West and Nicolson and a frequent visitor to Long Barn, and gave advice regarding Sissinghurst. Sackville-West denied that Jekyll's work had an impact on her own designs, but Nigel Nicolson described Lutyens' influence as "pervasive". Fleming and Gore go further, suggesting that the use of groupings of colours "followed Jekyll"; "a purple border, a cottage garden in red, orange and yellow, a walled garden pink [and] purple, a white garden, a herb garden". Scott-James notes however that
herbaceous borders, "Jekyll's speciality", were much disliked by Sackville-West. Other influencers and friends were the noted plantswoman
Norah Lindsay, the plant collector
Collingwood Ingram, who was their neighbour at
Benenden, and Reginald Cooper, one of Nicolson's closest friends, whose earlier garden at
Cothay Manor in
Somerset has been described as the "Sissinghurst of the West Country". Sackville-West's considerable knowledge of old roses was deepened by her friendship with
Edward Bunyard, plantsman, epicure, and the author of
Old Garden Roses, who was a frequent visitor. The historian Peter Davey places the garden at the very end of a tradition of
Arts and Crafts gardening which by the 1930s, in the face of changes in "taste and economics", had almost come to its close. The concept of "garden rooms" has been dated to the
Romans, who included rooms within some homes that opened on one side onto a garden. The horticultural scholar and gardener
Marie-Luise Gothein identified such a room at
Pliny's Villa Tusci, in her study
A History of Garden Art. In the late 19th century, reaction set in against both the
Victorian fashion for elaborate
bedding and
Italianate formality, and the earlier 18th century
landscape gardening modelled on the paintings of
Claude Lorrain and
Nicolas Poussin. This led in part to a concept of the "garden room" (distinct from the architectural concept of a
sunroom as a garden room) as a space out of doors, in which paths, corresponding to halls in a house, lead to enclosed gardens within the garden as a whole, conceived of as rooms. The architect
Hermann Muthesius described the style which developed into the Arts and Crafts approach in his '''' ("
The English House"): "the garden is seen as a continuation of the rooms of the house, almost a series of ... outdoor rooms, each of which is self-contained". A number of pre-Sissinghurst gardeners, including Jekyll and Lawrence Johnston, had designed in this style, and much of their work was known to Sackville-West and Nicolson. This landscaping feature has since become an established one in garden design. Many of the gardening themes developed at Sissinghurst were conceived during Sackville-West's and Nicolson's time at Long Barn: the prominence of roses, the emphasis on "rectilinear perspectives" through axial paths, and an informal, massed planting approach. Jane Brown suggests that "without Long Barn there would have been no Sissinghurst."
Head gardeners on the Moat Walk John Vass, appointed head gardener in 1939, left in 1957. Called up to the
RAF in 1941, he had urged that the hedges be maintained, confident that everything else in the garden could be restored after the war. Ronald Platt succeeded him from 1957 to 1959. In 1959
Pamela Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger were appointed as joint replacements. They remained at Sissinghurst until 1991, their contributions, "as much, if not more than Vita's, mak[ing] it the most admired and popular 20th-century garden in England". In 2006 they were awarded the
Royal Horticultural Society's Victoria Medal of Honour for their work at Sissinghurst. The pair were followed as head gardener by Sarah Cook, who was succeeded by Alexis Datta. In 2014, Troy Scott Smith, previously head gardener at
Bodnant, was appointed – the first male head gardener since the 1950s. He has written of the challenges of maintaining the garden "in the manner of its creator, after they have gone". In 2018 Scott Smith announced plans to extend the flowering season at Sissinghurst beyond the autumn period established by Schwerdt and Kreutzberger, into the winter months, allowing for year-round opening of the garden. A new history of the garden by Sarah Raven was published in 2014.
White Garden "A symphony in subtle shades of white and green", the White Garden is considered the "most renowned" and most influential of all of Sissinghurst's garden rooms. Planned before the war, it was completed in the winter of 1949–1950. Using a palette of white, silver, grey, and green, it has been called "one of Vita and Harold's most beautiful and romantic visions". Sackville-West recorded her original inspiration in a letter to Nicolson dated 12 December 1939: "I have got what I hope will be a lovely scheme for it: all white flowers, with some clumps of very pale pink". The concept of single-colour gardens had enjoyed some popularity at the end of the 19th century, but few such gardens remained when Sissinghurst was designed. Influences for the White Garden include
Hidcote and Phyllis Reiss's garden at
Tintinhull, both of which Vita had seen. Gertrude Jekyll had discussed the concept, but argued for varying the white palette with the use of blue or yellow plants, advice followed by Reiss. But neither Hidcote nor Tintinhull equals the "full-scale symphony" of the White Garden at Sissinghurst. A more prosaic motivation for the colour scheme was to provide reflected illumination for Sackville-West and Nicolson as they made their way from their bedrooms at the South Cottage to the Priest's House for dinner. The focal point of the garden was originally four almond trees, encased in a canopy of the white rose,
Rosa mulliganii. By the 1960s, the weight of the roses had severely weakened the trees, and they were replaced with an iron
arbour designed by Nigel Nicolson. Beneath the arbour is sited a
Ming dynasty vase bought in Cairo. A lead statue of a
Vestal Virgin, cast by
Toma Rosandić from the wooden original which is in the Big Room, presides over the garden. Sackville-West intended that the statue should be enveloped by a weeping pear tree,
Pyrus salicifolia 'Pendula', and the present tree was planted after her original was destroyed in the
Great Storm of 1987. Lord considers the White Garden "the most ambitious and successful of its time, the most entrancing of its type". A possibly apocryphal story records a visit by the colour-loving gardener
Christopher Lloyd, during which he is supposed to have scattered seeds of brightly coloured
nasturtiums across the lawn. Troy Scott Smith, the current head gardener, is undertaking a major research project on the history of the White Garden with the intention of recreating the original planting scheme in its entirety. This project has seen the number of plants being propagated in the Sissinghurst nursery rise from 400 to over 530.
Rose Garden The Rose Garden was constructed on the site of the old kitchen garden from 1937. It terminates the north–south axis running from the White Garden and concludes with a brick wall, designed by A. R. Powys and known as the Powys Wall, constructed in 1935. Such roses appealed not only for their lavish appearance, but also for their history. The informal and unstructured massing of the plants was Sackville-West's deliberate choice, and has become one of Sissinghurst's defining features. Roses were supplied by, among others,
Hilda Murrell of Edwin Murrell Ltd., notable rose growers in
Shropshire, and the florist
Constance Spry from her home
Winkfield Place. In addition to using established suppliers and receiving plants as gifts from friends, Sackville-West sometimes sourced specimens herself. Sarah Raven records Sackville-West digging up the
hybrid perpetual rose 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain' at an old nursery; Anne Scott-James noted that the rose had passed out of commerce and it was Sackville-West who returned it to cultivation. The Rose Garden is divided by the Roundel, constructed of yew hedging by Nicolson and Nigel in 1933. As elsewhere in the garden, the Trust has replaced the original grass paths with stone and brick, to cope with the increases in visitor numbers. Scott-James considered the roses in the Rose Garden "one of the finest collections in the world". The writer Jane Brown describes the Rose Garden, more than any other including the White, as expressing "the essence of Vita's gardening personality, just as her writing-room enshrines her poetic ghost".
Delos and Erechtheum Delos, between the Priest's House and the courtyard wall, was the one area of the garden that neither Sackville-West nor Nicolson considered a success. She explained its origins in an article in
Country Life in 1942 as being inspired by the terraced ruins covered with wild flowers she had observed on the island of
Delos. Neither the shade nor the soil, nor its inter-relationships with other parts of the garden, have proved satisfactory, either in the Nicolson's time or subsequently. The
Erechtheum, named after one of the temples at the
Acropolis, is a vine-covered
loggia and was used as a place for eating out of doors.
Cottage and Herb Gardens The dominating colours in the
Cottage Garden are hot saturated shades of red, orange, and yellow, a colour scheme that both Sackville-West and Nicolson claimed as their own conception. Lord considers it as much a traditional "cottage garden as
Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid". Here, as elsewhere, Sackville-West was much influenced by
William Robinson, a gardener she greatly admired and who had done much to popularise the concept of the cottage garden. It contains four beds, surrounded by simple paths, with planting in colours that Sackville-West described as those of the sunset. Plants include a range of
dahlias, a particular favourite of Nicolson's, and the
red-hot poker, which he despised. In a 1937 letter to his wife he observed, "I think the secret of your gardening is simply that you have the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful flowers. Except for those beastly red-hot pokers which you have a weakness for, there is not an ugly flower in the whole place." The Herb Garden contains
sage,
thyme,
hyssop,
fennel and an unusual seat built around a
camomile bush. Known to the family as
Edward the Confessor's chair, it was constructed by Copper, the Nicolson's chauffeur. Originally laid out in the 1930s, the garden was revitalised by John Vass in the years immediately after the Second World War. The Lion Basin in the centre of the garden was brought back from Turkey in 1914. Most of the over one hundred herbs in the garden are now started in the nurseries and planted out at appropriate times of year.
Walks, the Nuttery, and the Moat The Lime Walk, also known as the Spring Garden, was the one part of Sissinghurst where Nicolson undertook the planting as well as the design. He had originally intended a single axis running straight from the Rose Garden, through the Cottage Garden, and then through the Nuttery to the moat, but the topography of the site precluded that. Instead, an angled walk was established in the mid-1930s, and substantially replanted in 1945–1962. Sackville-West was critical of the angularity of the design, comparing it to Platform 5 at
Charing Cross station, but treasured it as her husband's creation. "I walked down the Spring Garden and all your little flowers tore and bit at my heart. I do love you so, Hadji. It is quite simple: I do love you so. Just that." The
limes are
pleached and the dominant plant is
Euphorbia polychroma 'Major'. Nicolson kept meticulous gardening records of his efforts in the Lime Walk from 1947 to the late 1950s and, providing consolation after the end of his parliamentary career, he described the walk as "My Life's Work". The Yew Walk runs parallel to the Tower Lawn. Its narrow width has been problematic, and by the late 1960s the yew hedges were failing. Extensive pruning proved successful in revitalising the avenue. The Nuttery was famed for its carpet of
polyanthus. Nicolson called it "the loveliest planting scheme in the whole world". Unlike the other gardens, where flowering plants were placed within flower beds, in the Nuttery and the Orchard plants were allowed to spread across lawns as though they were growing in the wild. By the 1960s, the plants were dying, and attempts to improve the soil did not assist. The primrose carpet was replaced in the 1970s by a mixture of woodland flowers and grasses. The Moat Walk stands on the old bowling green constructed by Sir Richard Baker in the 1560s and his reconstructed moat wall provides the axis. The
azaleas were bought with the £100 Heinemann prize Sackville-West received in 1946 for her last published poem,
The Land. The
wisteria were a gift from her mother,
Lady Sackville, as were the six bronze vases. A bench designed by Lutyens terminates one end of the walk, the other focal point being the statue of Dionysus across the moat. The two arms of the moat that remain from the medieval house are populated by
goldfish,
carp, and
golden orfe.
Orchard The Orchard was an unproductive area of fruit trees when the Nicolsons arrived. The unplanned layout was retained as a contrast to the formality of most of the garden; the fruit trees were paired with climbing roses and the area provided space for the many gifts of plants and trees they received. The rose
Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate', a present from Sackville-West's friend and fellow gardener Heather Muir of
Kiftsgate Court, is one example. This part of the garden suffered particularly severe losses in the
Great Storm of 1987 and much replanting has taken place. The Orchard is the setting for two structures planned by Nigel Nicolson and commissioned in memory of his father: the boathouse and the gazebo. The gazebo, of 1969, is by Francis Pym and has a
candlesnuffer roof intended to evoke those of Kentish
oast houses. The boathouse, of timber construction and with
Tuscan colonnades, dates from 2002 and is by the local architectural firm
Purcell Miller Tritton. ==Plants==