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.
The White Garden is set between the Priest’s House (an Elizabethan banqueting house in origin, used by the Nicolsons as their kitchen/dining room) and the Tower Lawn with the South Cottage (where they slept) beyond. Here ‘Crambe cordifolia’, white foxgloves, rose “Penelope” and ‘Achillea ptarmica’ “The Pearl” glimmer at night, when the garden was designed to be seen – when walking home to bed after dinner, when the whites glow in the dark, floating free, and the greens absorb what light there is. Ideally, just then, a barn owl flies through
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
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