Sissinghurst Castle - Part Sixteen
This is the 16th in a series of articles about the gardens that Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson created at Sissinghurst Castle. My previous article was about the Rose Garden. This article is about the The complex relationship between Sissinghurst's Lime Walk and Rose Garden.
The photo above was taken from the top of Sissinghurst's tower and shows the Cottage Garden and the eastern part of the Rose Garden. 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.
Harold had a strong preference for axial planning, but Sissinghurst's Tudor manorhouse and the earlier Medieval buildings had not been laid out like a classical villa of the Italian Renaissance, so Harold's designs for Sissinghurst's gardens had to be very ingenious.
In the lower left of the photo at the top of this article you can see the walk which is lined on both sides by tall hedges of clipped yew; this leads from the eastern part of the Rose Garden between the Tower Lawn and the Orchard to the eastern edge of the White Garden. The roof of the South Cottage shows through trees on the left side of the photograph. Please notice the four clipped yews to the right of the South Cottage; they stand like stand like sentinels at the point where the main paths of the Cottage Garden intersect. These yews are represented by small green circles in the maps below. A clipped hedge of yew separates the Cottage Garden from the Rose Garden. On the far right you can see part of the Rondel's clipped yew hedges.
The photo below shows the western half of the Rose Garden. The Rondel is on the left. The paved walk at the top of the Rondel leads to the Lime Walk.
The map below shows how the Rondel connects the Rose Garden with the Lime Walk. The garden's paved walks are colored pale brown, while the buildings are colored a deeper shade of brown. The south corner of the Entry Range is shown in the bottom right corner and the South Cottage lies directly below the four circles of the the clipped yews. The Cottage Garden was intended to be a private family garden surrounded by the more public Rose Garden, Lime Walk, and Moat Walk. This is why the only walk connecting the Rose Garden with the Cottage Garden is the one that runs along the Lime Walk; most visitors wouldn't take that route.
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