Sissinghurst Castle Garden
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat. It is among the most famous gardens in England and is designated Grade I on Historic England's register of historic parks and gardens. It was bought by Sackville-West in 1930, and over the next thirty years, working with, and later succeeded by, a series of notable head gardeners, she and Nicolson transformed a farmstead of "squalor and slovenly disorder" into one of the world's most influential gardens. Following Sackville-West's death in 1962, the estate was donated to the National Trust. It was ranked 42nd on the list of the Trust's most-visited sites in the 2021–2022 season, with over 150,000 visitors.
The gardens contain an internationally respected plant collection, particularly the assemblage of old garden roses. The writer Anne Scott-James considered the roses at Sissinghurst to be "one of the finest collections in the world". A number of plants propagated in the gardens bear names related to people connected with Sissinghurst or the name of the garden itself. The garden design is based on axial walks that open onto enclosed gardens, termed "garden rooms", one of the earliest examples of this gardening style. Among the individual "garden rooms", the White Garden has been particularly influential, with the horticulturalist Tony Lord describing it as "the most ambitious... of its time, the most entrancing of its type."
The site of Sissinghurst is ancient and has been occupied since at least the Middle Ages. The present-day buildings began as a house built in the 1530s by Sir John Baker. In 1554 Sir John's daughter Cecily married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, an ancestor of Vita Sackville-West. By the 18th century the Bakers' fortunes had waned, and the house, renamed Sissinghurst Castle, was leased to the government to act as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Seven Years' War. The prisoners caused great damage and by the 19th century much of Sir Richard's house had been demolished. In the mid-19th century, the remaining buildings were in use as a workhouse, and by the 20th century Sissinghurst had declined to the status of a farmstead. In 1928 the castle was advertised for sale but remained unsold for two years.
Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole, the ancestral home of the Sackvilles. But for her sex, Sackville-West would have inherited Knole on the death of her father in 1928. Instead, following primogeniture, the house and the title passed to her uncle, a loss she felt deeply. In 1930, after she and Nicolson became concerned that their home Long Barn was threatened by development, Sackville-West bought Sissinghurst Castle. On purchasing Sissinghurst, Sackville-West and Nicolson inherited little more than some oak and nut trees, a quince, and a single old rose. Sackville-West planted the noisette rose 'Madame Alfred Carrière' on the south face of the South Cottage even before the deeds to the property had been signed. Nicolson was largely responsible for planning the garden design, while Sackville-West undertook the planting. Over the next thirty years, working with her head gardeners, she cultivated some two hundred varieties of roses and large numbers of other flowers and shrubs. Decades after Sackville-West and Nicolson created "a garden where none was", Sissinghurst remains a major influence on horticultural thought and practice.
History
Early history
The site is ancient; "hurst" is the Saxon term for an enclosed wood. Nigel Nicolson, in his 1964 guide, Sissinghurst Castle: An Illustrated History, records the earliest owners as the de Saxinhersts. Stephen de Saxinherst is named in an 1180 charter about the nearby Combwell Priory. At the end of the 13th century the estate had passed, through marriage, to the de Berhams. Nicolson suggested that the de Berhams constructed a moated house in stone, of an appearance similar to that of Ightham Mote, which was later replaced by a brick manor. More recent studies, including those of Nicolson's son, Adam, cast doubt on the existence of an earlier stone manor, suggesting instead that the brick house, or perhaps a timber construction of a slightly earlier date, occupying the corner of the orchard nearest the moat, was the earliest house on the site. Edward I is reputed to have stayed at this house in 1305.Rise, decline, collapse: c. 1490–1930
In 1490 the de Berhams sold the manor of Sissinghurst to Thomas Baker of Cranbrook. The Bakers were cloth producers and in the following century, through marriage and careers at court and in the law, Thomas's successors greatly expanded their wealth and their estates in Kent and Sussex. In the 1530s Sir John Baker, one of Henry VIII's Privy Councillors, built a new brick gatehouse, the current West Range. In 1554 Sir John's daughter Cecily married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, creating the earliest connection between the Sackville family and the house. Sir John's son Richard undertook a massive prodigy expansion in the 1560s. The Tower is part of that expansion, and formed the entrance to a very large courtyard house, of which the South Cottage and some walls are the only other remaining fragments. Sir Richard surrounded the mansion with an enclosed deer park and in August 1573 entertained Queen Elizabeth I at Sissinghurst.After the collapse of the Baker family fortunes following the civil war, the building declined in importance. Horace Walpole visited in 1752: "yesterday, after twenty mishaps, we got to Sissinghurst for dinner. There is a park in ruins and a house in ten times greater ruins." During the Seven Years' War, it became a prisoner-of-war camp. The historian Edward Gibbon, then serving in the Hampshire militia, was stationed there and recorded "the inconceivable dirtiness of the season, the country and the spot". It was during its use as a camp for French prisoners that the name Sissinghurst Castle was adopted; although it was never a castle, there is debate as to the extent to which the house was a fortified manor. In 2018 an important collection of historical graffiti drawn by some of the 3,000 prisoners was uncovered beneath 20th-century plaster.
Around 1800, the estate was purchased by the Mann family and the majority of Sir Richard's Elizabethan house was demolished; the stone and brick were reused in buildings throughout the locality. The castle later became a workhouse for the Cranbrook Union, after which it housed farm labourers. In 1928, the castle was put up for sale for a price of £12,000, but attracted no bids for two years.
Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson: 1930–1968
Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West, poet, author, and gardener, was born at Knole, about 25 miles from Sissinghurst, on 9 March 1892. The great Elizabethan mansion, home of her ancestors but denied to her through agnatic primogeniture, held enormous importance for her throughout her life. Sissinghurst was a substitute for Knole, and she greatly valued its familial connections. In 1913 Sackville-West married Harold Nicolson, a diplomat at the start of his career. Their relationship was unconventional, with both pursuing multiple, mainly same-sex, affairs. After breaking with her lover Violet Trefusis in 1921, Sackville-West became increasingly withdrawn. She wrote to her mother that she would like "to live alone in a tower with her books", an ambition she achieved in the tower at Sissinghurst where only her dogs were regularly admitted.From 1946 until a few years before her death, Sackville-West wrote a gardening column for The Observer, in which, although she never referred directly to Sissinghurst, she discussed a wide array of horticultural issues. In an article, "Some Flowers", she discussed the challenge of writing effectively about flowers: "I discovered this only when I started to do so. Before ... I found myself losing my temper with the nauseating phraseology ... and sickly vocabulary employed." In 1955, in recognition of her achievement at Sissinghurst, "bending some stubborn acres to my will", she was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Veitch Medal. Her biographer Victoria Glendinning considers Sissinghurst to be Sackville-West's "one magnificent act of creation".
Harold Nicolson
Harold Nicolson, diplomat, author, diarist, and politician, was born in Tehran on 21 September 1886. Following his father into the diplomatic corps, he served as a junior member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, and returned to Iran as Counsellor in 1925. In 1929 he resigned from the Foreign Office to pursue a career in journalism, editing the Londoner's Diary for Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard. This proved unsuccessful, as did his subsequent political career, which saw him move from Oswald Mosley's New Party to Clement Attlee's Labour Party. Throughout, he maintained a detailed private diary. His entry for 4 April 1930, records, "Vita telephones to say she has seen the ideal house – a place in Kent, near Cranbrook, a sixteenth-century castle".Building a garden
Sackville-West and Nicolson found Sissinghurst in April 1930, after Dorothy Wellesley, their near neighbour and a former lover of Sackville-West's, saw the estate for sale. They had become increasingly concerned about encroaching development near their property Long Barn, near Sevenoaks, Kent. Their offer on Sissinghurst was accepted on 6 May and the castle and the farm around it were bought for £12,375, using only Sackville-West's money rather than Nicolson's.The property was in total. The house had no electricity, running water, or drains, and the garden was in disarray. Anne Scott-James notes their "planting inheritance" as "a grove of nut-trees, some apple trees, a quince a tangle of old roses". The physical assets on the site were "four buildings of beautiful mellow brick, part of a moat various fine walls". Clearing the ground took almost three years, but by 1939 the garden was largely complete, with the exception of the White Garden. Nicolson was responsible for the design and layout, while Sackville-West, at the head of her team of gardeners, undertook the planting. Simon Jenkins, the architectural writer, describes Nicolson's design as "post-Picturesque, a garden not as an imitation of nature but as imitation of a house", and suggests his thinking was much influenced by Lawrence Johnston's garden at Hidcote. Sackville-West's approach was plant-centred, within the constraints of her husband's plan, "profusion, even extravagance and exuberance, within confines of the utmost linear severity".
The buildings scattered around the site were converted to become an unconventional home. Part of the long brick gatehouse range from Sir John Baker's construction of c.1533 became the library, or Big Room; the tower gatehouse dating from Richard Baker's rebuilding in 1560–1570 became Sackville-West's sitting room, study, and sanctuary. The Priest's House was home to their sons Ben and Nigel, and held the family dining room, while the South Cottage housed their bedrooms and Nicolson's writing room.
The garden was first opened to the paying public for two days in mid-1938. Thereafter, the opening hours were gradually increased. Despite her love of privacy, Sackville-West came to enjoy greatly her encounters with the visitors, known as "shillingses" on account of the entrance fees they deposited in a bowl at the gate. She described her relationship with them in a 1939 article in the New Statesman: "between them and myself a particular form of courtesy survives, a gardener's courtesy". Nicolson was less welcoming. Sackville-West's Observer articles raised awareness of the garden; Scott-James records photographic articles in Gardening Illustrated, ''Vogue, and Picture Post'', and notes consequently that "increasingly paying visitors poured into Sissinghurst, coming in thousands in the course of a summer".