The photo above shows the South Cottage, with Harold's chair by the cottage door. The photographs in this article were taken by Dave Parker and may not be reproduced in any way without his permission; his website features many beautiful photographs of Sissinghurst Castle.
The Cottage Garden and the garden next to the Priest's House are the oldest of Sissinghurst's "garden rooms"; the paths of both were laid in 1931. The garden next to the Priest's House was replanted in 1950 as a white garden, but the Cottage Garden retains its original color scheme of sunset hues.
While this garden has a simple plan of crossing paths that is typical of traditional cottage gardens, the color scheme is rather unusual. The plants in traditional cottage gardens tended to be in shades of pink, lavender and white. This isn't because the cottagers preferred those colors, it is just that there weren't a lot of brightly colored flowers in English gardens before the nineteenth century, and the cottagers were growing flowers from divisions and saved seeds; they weren't buying plants from nurseries. This method of sharing plants and seeds meant that it usually took awhile for new imports and hybrids to enter cottage gardens.
Sissinghurst's Cottage Garden was always filled with the latest hybrids and newly introduced species True cottage plants were more likely to be planted with the roses in the garden next to the Priest's House or in the later Rose Garden because the colors harmonized with old roses. Even the Cottage Garden's bearded iris and columbine were the latest hybrids when Vita planted them in the early 1930's. The gardeners have continued to add new varieties, such as the hybrid Crocosmia 'Lucifer' and newer varieties of dahlias.
The above photograph shows one of the paths in the Cottage Garden. They are an unusual combination of bricks and stones, but rather than looking like "crazy paving", the paving actually seems rather stylish - in a rustic manner. Now that the garden has so many visitors, the paths have been set in cement, but in Harold and Vita's day, they were covered with creeping thyme along with self-sown pansies and pinks.
The photo above shows the antique copper boiler that Vita found in a farmyard and placed at the intersection of the Cottage Garden's principle paths. Irish yews mark the four corners of this intersection. Vita left them untrimmed, but by the late 1960s, they had grown so large that they were totally out of proportion with the garden. It was decided that they should be radically cut back and the branches were tied in by winding government-surplus telephone cable around them. I have seen photos of these yews before they were pruned, and the shaggy appearance fitted the garden much better, but I can understand why their size had to be reduced. I just question why they need to be kept so neatly shorn.
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