Sissinghurst Likes it Hot

The Cottage garden and Azalea Bank at Sissinghurst were ablaze with color when I visited last week with the Best of English Gardens Tour. The palate of the Cottage Garden tends toward the hot spectrum and late May was no exception.

The central feature of the Cottage Garden is four large Irish yews. The  yews are not perfectly upright, adding to a more informal feel to the garden.

Columbines were a prominent feature to the garden.

Seed is collected for the best coloring of this unnamed variety each year.

Wall flowers burnt brightly in the drizzle the day I was at Sissinghurst.

Apparently Harold Nicholson was not a big fan of azaleas and felt they were too suburban. Vita Sackville-West often won the debate over which plants made their way into the garden and the hot-colored azaleas were no exception and remain a feature in the Moat Walk.

Tulipa sprengeri was well-represented in many of the gardens we visited and made a worthy companion to the peeling bark of Acer griseum.

Hedges Grow

 November  2000

November  2013

The yew hedge enclosing the Lower Garden was planted 13 years ago. I spent a couple years terracing the land wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load. That phase was not a pretty site; it looked more like a construction site than a garden. I spent most of my budget on loam so when it came time to plant the hedge, I used tiny bareroot whips of Hick's yew, Taxus × media 'Hicksii'. I remember reading in The Vita Sachville-West's Garden Book that small plants establish more quickly and caught up in height with larger plants in a few years. Since I couldn't afford large plants, I liked that idea a lot. The hedge was a bit of a joke with gardening friends for about 7 years and then miraculously, it became a wall which created a garden room. Visually and emotionally, it made the visitor feel like they would not tumble down the steep slope on which the garden has been built. What is planted in the garden beds continues to evolve but the structure or bones will hopefully survive for many years to come.

Vita's Vertigo

Climbing Vita Sackville-West's tower reminds me of Hitcock's film Vertigo.

It is my favorite thing to do at Sissinghurst. It is as if she never left.

 

 

 

Careful, 'Scottie'......

Vita's Tower

The Rose Garden From the Top of the Tower

The Cottage Garden with Four Central Pillars. The Yew Walk in the Foreground

The White Garden and the Tower Lawn

The Entrance with the Main House to the Left and the Long Library to the Right

The Fireplace in Vita's Tower-Room

My favorite views at Sissinghurst, The Kent garden and home of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson, are from the tall tower. The tower was built in the 1560's was the center of the estate at that time. My first task upon reaching Sissinghurst was to climb the 78 stairs up the spiral staircase to the pinnacle of the turret to get a bird's eye view of the garden. It is a journey that would make Jimmy Stewart's character in Vertigo shutter.

Vita's study in the tower-room is on the second or third level. The tower-room is where she wrote her novels and poetry in the late hours of the evening after a full day of gardening. The corner fireplace was apparently never used. She preferred piling coats on her lap and to use an electric heater at her feet in bitter cold. Vita's lover, Virginia Woolf, was one of the few people allowed to enter the tower-room; even her children were forbidden. The room is exactly as she left it when she died in 1962, at the age of 70.

Harold's Enclosures

Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson's Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent, England is a great example of structure enclosing textures and flowers. They began making the garden in the 1930's. The design was built around the existing walls and dilapidated buildings. Harold added more brick walls and hedges of yew, box and hornbeam. He described his aim as "a combination of expectation and surprise" or a "succession of intimacies". I took these photographs from the top of the tower where Vita did her writing. Although Vita's plantings are the more famous, Harold's structure makes the garden special. Some gardens have beautiful plants and other gardens have excellent bones but a select few have both. For me, the most satisfying gardens have a strong and well thought out structure and distinctive plants grown in an environment that makes them happy.

Vita's Frost

Gardener, if you listen, listen well:

Plant for your winter pleasure, when the months

Dishearten; plant to find a fragile note

Touched from the brittle violin of frost.

Vita Sackville-West from The Garden