The photo above shows the shows the Rose Garden's long border (on the right side of the walk). 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.
Vita loved roses above all other flowers. It has been said that if all other flowers were removed from Sissinghurst, it would still be one of the world's greatest gardens. This partially because of the garden's formal structure, but it also emphasizes the important role that roses have always played in Sissinghurst's gardens.
Sissinghurst's Rose Garden occupies the walled space that was once the garden of the Tudor manor. The Nicolsons grew vegetables here until 1937, but the Rondel's yew hedges were planted in 1932. The photograph below shows the Rondel and the eastern half of the rose garden. You can see from the grand design that Nicolsons always planned for this area to be an ornamental garden.
Like Sissinghurst's entry courtyard, the Tudor garden wasn't a perfect rectangle. The Rondel divides the rectangle in two - making the odd proportions less noticeable. The Rondel isn't placed in the center of the rectangle. It lines up with a doorway of the old Tudor house, so the eastern part of the Rose Garden is larger than the western part.
Some sources say that the Rondel was based upon measurements of the traditional drying floors of oast houses, but Vita seemed to contradict this when she wrote: "I think that my deepest stab of pleasure came when I discovered that the country people gave the name of Rondel to a circular patch of turf surrounded by one of our yew hedges. There was all poetry, all romance, in that name; it suggested Provence and the troubadours and the Courts of Love; but I think that I liked it even better when I realized that they were using a term much more familiar to them: the name they normally gave to the round floor for drying hops inside one of our Kentish oasts."
The Rondel's design is quite unusual because the tall hedges block views into the garden, except along the walks. In his book "Gardening at Sissinghurst", Tony Lord speculates that the hedges were intended to screen visitors from the sight of the vegetable garden, but I doubt that this was the reason. The Rondel's hedges were small during the years that this was a vegetable garden and the vistas that one sees through the openings really don't screen the plantings. The purpose of the hedges is to focus the viewers attention on a focal point at the end of each walk. This is very clear in the photograph below, which shows the walk between the Rondel and the old doorway of the Tudor manorhouse, with the tower beyond, on the left..
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