One of the world's most influential gardens was a ruined farmstead in 1930.
When Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson bought Sissinghurst in Kent, it had no electricity or running water, just a few nut trees, a quince and a tangle of old roses. Over thirty years they made a series of outdoor 'rooms', including a White Garden that gardeners still imitate worldwide.
Sackville-West, a poet and novelist, grew up at Knole, the great Sackville house in Kent, and would have inherited it had she been a man; she felt the loss deeply. In 1930, worried about development near their home, she and her diplomat husband bought the neglected remains of a Tudor manor that had since served as a prisoner-of-war camp, a workhouse and a farm, paying £12,375 from her own money. Clearing the ground took almost three years.
They divided the work. Nicolson designed the structure: long, straight walks with focal points at their ends, opening onto enclosed gardens hedged or walled like the rooms of a house. He described the effect as a succession of privacies, each a further escape from the world. Sackville-West did the planting, with a philosophy she summed up in her Observer gardening column: 'Cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny.' She grew some two hundred varieties of roses, and the collection of old garden roses is still considered one of the finest anywhere.
The most famous room is the White Garden, planned before the war and completed in the winter of 1949 to 1950. She first described the idea in a 1939 letter: all white flowers, with some clumps of very pale pink. Planted in white, silver, grey and green, it has been called the most ambitious and influential garden of its type. Elsewhere she deliberately massed purple flowers in a border, defying the famous designer Gertrude Jekyll's advice against it.
The garden first opened to paying visitors for two days in 1938; Sackville-West nicknamed them the 'shillingses' after the coins they left at the gate. After her death in 1962 her son Nigel persuaded a hesitant National Trust to take it on in 1967. It now draws around 150,000 to 200,000 visitors a year, and the 'garden room' has become a staple of garden design.
Source: Wikipedia — Sissinghurst Castle Garden · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
