Sissinghurst Castle Garden

rdf:langString Sissinghurst Castle Garden

rdf:langString Sissinghurst Castle Garden

rdf:langString Sissinghurst Castle Garden

rdf:langString West Range at Sissinghurst Castle

rdf:langString Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

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rdf:langString right

rdf:langString A group of loosely petaled white roses with a tint of pale pink, with the flowers at various stages from a closed bud to a fully open flower, green foliage behind.

rdf:langString Close-up of a cup-shaped white rose with a bit of green in the centre, with some pale pink rosebuds alongside.

rdf:langString View across garden to fields. Small redbrick cottage to left.

rdf:langString Close-up of a fully open rose with magenta-lavender petals and yellow stamens.

rdf:langString Clusters of flat-petaled white roses and deep pink rosebuds with green foliage

rdf:langString Close-up of a fully open rose with dark velvety red petals and yellow stamens

rdf:langString Close-up photo of a dark pink rose with a cuplike shape.

rdf:langString #c6dbf7

rdf:langString 'Félicité et Perpétue' is also grown in the Orchard.

rdf:langString Aerial view in 2009: "The most famous twentieth century garden in England"

rdf:langString 'Madame Plantier' is grown against trees in the Orchard.

rdf:langString 'Madame Alfred Carrière' was the first rose she planted at Sissinghurst.

rdf:langString 'Madame Pierre Oger' was one of Sackville-West's favourite roses.

rdf:langString Grade I

rdf:langString Grade II*

rdf:langString Historic garden

rdf:langString Sissinghurst Castle

rdf:langString The moss rose 'Nuits de Young' and the gallica rose 'Tuscany' have the "less familiar" colours typical of old roses at Sissinghurst.

rdf:langString Mme Alfred Carrière3.1 r.JPG

rdf:langString Mmeplantier.JPG

rdf:langString Rosa 'Felicite et Perpetue'.jpg

rdf:langString Rosa 'Mme Pierre Oger'.jpg

rdf:langString Rosa 'Nuits de Young' 2.jpg

rdf:langString Rosa 'Tuscany' J1.jpg

rdf:langString Kent

rdf:langString Never, never, never! Au grand jamais, jamais. Never, never, never! ... so long as I live no National Trust ... shall have my darling. No, no. Over my corpse or my ashes, not otherwise. It is bad enough to have lost my Knole but they shan't take Sissinghurst from me. That at least is my own. They shan't, they shan't, I won't. They can't make me, I won't. They can't make me. I never would.

rdf:langString Formality is often essential to the plan of a garden but never to the arrangement of its flowers and shrubs.

rdf:langString Between the apple-blossom and the water –

rdf:langString Each flower her son and every tree her daughter.

rdf:langString She walks among the loveliness she made,

rdf:langString She walks among the patterned pied brocade,

rdf:langString One might reasonably have hoped to inherit century-old hedges of yew, some gnarled mulberries, a cedar or two, a pleached alley, flagged walls, a mound. Instead there was nothing but weed, rough grass, a shabby eyesore of a greenhouse in the wrong place, broken fencing, wired chicken runs, squalor and slovenly disorder everywhere.

rdf:langString –Sackville-West's first impressions of Sissinghurst

rdf:langString –Sackville-West's reaction to the suggestion that Sissinghurst might be gifted to the National Trust

rdf:langString –William Robinson, author of The English Flower Garden and a major influence on Sackville-West's planting style

rdf:langString –Sackville-West's reflections on Sissinghurst towards the end of her life

rdf:langString –Extract from Sackville-West's poem The Land, printed on the service sheet for her funeral

rdf:langString Garden

rdf:langString Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat. It is among the most famous gardens in England and is designated Grade I on Historic England's register of historic parks and gardens. It was bought by Sackville-West in 1930, and over the next thirty years, working with, and later succeeded by, a series of notable head gardeners, she and Nicolson transformed a farmstead of "squalor and slovenly disorder" into one of the world's most influential gardens. Following Sackville-West's death in 1962, the estate was donated to the National Trust. It is one of the Trust's most popular properties, with nearly 200,000 visitors in 2017. The gardens contain an internationally respected plant collection, particularly the assemblage of old garden roses. The writer Anne Scott-James considered the roses at Sissinghurst to be "one of the finest collections in the world". A number of plants propagated in the gardens bear names related to people connected with Sissinghurst or the name of the garden itself. The garden design is based on axial walks that open onto enclosed gardens, termed "garden rooms", one of the earliest examples of this gardening style. Among the individual "garden rooms", the White Garden has been particularly influential, with the horticulturalist Tony Lord describing it as "the most ambitious ... of its time, the most entrancing of its type." The site of Sissinghurst is ancient and has been occupied since at least the Middle Ages. The present-day buildings began as a house built in the 1530s by Sir John Baker. In 1554 Sir John's daughter Cecily married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, an ancestor of Vita Sackville-West. By the 18th century the Baker's fortunes had waned, and the house, renamed Sissinghurst Castle, was leased to the government to act as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Seven Years' War. The prisoners caused great damage and by the 19th century much of Sir Richard's house had been demolished. In the mid-19th century, the remaining buildings were in use as a workhouse, and by the 20th century Sissinghurst had declined to the status of a farmstead. In 1928 the castle was advertised for sale but remained unsold for two years. Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole, the ancestral home of the Sackvilles. But for her sex, Sackville-West would have inherited Knole on the death of her father in 1928. Instead, following primogeniture, the house and the title passed to her uncle, a loss she felt deeply. In 1930, after she and Nicolson became concerned that their home Long Barn was threatened by development, Sackville-West bought Sissinghurst Castle. On purchasing Sissinghurst, Sackville-West and Nicolson inherited little more than some oak and nut trees, a quince, and a single old rose. Sackville-West planted the noisette rose 'Madame Alfred Carrière' on the south face of the South Cottage even before the deeds to the property had been signed. Nicolson was largely responsible for planning the garden design, while Sackville-West undertook the planting. Over the next thirty years, working with her head gardeners, she cultivated some two hundred varieties of roses and large numbers of other flowers and shrubs. Decades after Sackville-West and Nicolson created "a garden where none was", Sissinghurst remains a major influence on horticultural thought and practice.

rdf:langString Tower and Walls 30 yards East of the West Range at Sissinghurst Castle

rdf:langString The Priest's House at Sissinghurst Castle

rdf:langString The South Cottage