What a stressful morning! At least the sun has come out now reminding me that soon I will be able to get out and about enjoying gardens again. In the meanwhile I still have the photographs from previous garden visits. These were taken at Sissinghurst which is a garden in a ruin in a farm. It was created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson in the 1930s.
The site is ancient— “hurst” is the Saxon term for “an enclosed wood”. A manorhouse with a three-armed moat was built here in the Middle Ages.The house was given a new brick gatehouse in the 1530s by Sir John Baker, one of Henry VIII’s Privy Councillors, and hugely enlarged in the 1560s by his son Sir Richard Baker, when it became the centre of a 700-acre (2.8 km2) deer park. For Sackville-West, Sissinghurst and its garden rooms came to be a poignant and romantic substitute for Knole, reputedly the largest house in Britain, which as the only child of Lionel, the 3rd Lord Sackville she would have inherited had she been a male, but which had passed to her uncle as the male heir.
After the collapse of the Baker family in the late 17th century, the building had many uses: as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Seven Years’ War; as the workhouse for the Cranbrook Union; after which it became homes for farm labourers.
Sackville-West and Nicolson found Sissinghurst in 1930 after concern that their property Long Barn, near Sevenoaks, Kent, was close to development over which they had no control. Although Sissinghurst was derelict, they purchased the ruins and the farm around it and began constructing the garden we know today. The layout by Nicolson and planting by Sackville-West were both strongly influenced by the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens.
Enclosed woods and gardens are a lovely feature of Britain.
They are
Now the snow has gone I shall have to go to Attingham again to go for a walk. It would have been nice to walk around there in the snow, but I didn’t get the chance.
Beautiful garden but vile people were Harold and Vita
They were certainly an odd couple!
I can’t believe I lived in England for two years and never went to Sissinghurst. Probably because I didn’t know much about Vita in those days.
What a wonderful place it would be to go now that I have read so much over the years.
From the garden point of view I have known it is a must place to visit. But it took me far longer than two years to get there.
I hope you get the chance for a UK holiday and a visit
[...] is the home of the Sackville family and was the childhood home of Vita Sackville-West and she loved it with a passion. The house passed down through the male line of the family so due [...]