Sissinghurst Castle - Part Two

I have just finished reading Vita, a biography of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning. I knew a bit about Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson, so the information in this book didn't surprise me, but it did help me to better understand the role that Sissinghurst played in their lives. My topic is garden design, so rather than write about the Nicolson's unconventional marriage, I will focus on their gardens, but I highly recommend this book.

The first garden that they created together was at a Medieval house named "Long Barn", which they bought in 1914, during the second year of their marriage. Such an old house had undoubtedly had gardens in the past, but no trace of them existed when the Nicolson's bought the property, so the garden was entirely their creation.

The garden at Long Barn, like their later garden at Sissinghurst was a product of Harold and Vita's different tastes and temperaments. Vita was born at Knole, one of the grandest of Elizabethan houses. As the only child of the 3rd Baron Sackville, Vita felt that she should inherit Knole, but because she was female, the estate went to her father's younger brother. Vita resented losing Knole, and filled both of her homes at Long Barn and Sissinghurst with seventeenth century furniture, while her taste in gardens was lush and romantic. Harold preferred the elegance of eighteenth century Georgian homes, but he shared with Vita a love for the gardens of Renaissance Italy. In her book The English Garden in Our Time, Jane Brown describes the garden at Long Barn as "a rustic English version of an Italian villa garden with terraces of lawns, box-edged parterres of roses and lilies, small avenues of Lombardy poplars, a damp woodland of azaleas and wild flowers, and an apple garden, the enclosed orchard carpeted with spring flowers and roses in memory of Knole."

Go To Page: 1 2 3