The British garden that is most likely to have been a source of inspiration for Sissinghurst's White Garden is the Fountain Garden at Tintinhull House. The garden at Tintinhull was created by Phyllis Reiss between 1933 and 1953. It has often been described as a Hidcote in miniature because, like Hidcote, it features formal "garden rooms" that are informally planted. The Fountain Garden is a circular enclosures at the end of a long straight walk which passes through two rectangular enclosures. Much of the space in the circular enclosure is taken up by a circular lilypond at the garden's center. A walk encircles the lilypond and there are narrow flowerbeds between the walk and the yew hedge which encloses the garden. I am not sure when the Fountain Garden was planted with white flowers; my research has just told me that the garden was planted before 1950 and that Vita undoubtedly was familiar with the planting, since Tintinhull was one of her favorite gardens.
The Fountain Garden at Tintinhull wasn't really intended to be a white garden; it featured pale flowers among gray foliage. Vita probably did get some ideas for plant combinations from this garden, but she had been thinking about creating a white garden back in 1939 while the threat of war was looming over England. By the time that Vita created he white garden, she had been thinking about it for a decade, so she had undoubtedly made the idea her own. Vita's original idea had been to transform the Lion Pond in Sissinghurst's inner courtyard into a white garden (I will be writing about the Lion Pond in part nine of this series). If she had done that, her white garden would just have been a bed of white flowers; the 1950 re-planting of the garden next to the Priest's House was a much more ambitious undertaking.
In my first article about the garden next to the Priest's House, I pointed out that the layout of the garden is typical of Islamic gardens. People often think of Sissinghurst as a very English garden, but it is important to realize that for Harold and Vita, Sissinghurst's gardens were closely associated with Persian Gardens. Harold was born in Teheran, (his father was a diplomat), and it was as a young diplomat that Harold was posted there during the 1920s. Vita traveled to Persia twice while Harold was there, in 1926 and 1927; it was there that Vita fell in love with the idea of gardens being works of art that can refresh the soul, rather than just places to grow flowers.
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