Sissinghurst Garden
Sissinghurst Castle Garden in the Kent Weald is one of the most celebrated and most influential gardens in the world, created by Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson from 1930 onward within the ruins of an Elizabethan mansion whose towers and walls provided the framework for a sequence of outdoor rooms of exceptional quality and individuality. The National Trust manages the garden, which receives over 200,000 visitors annually and is consistently cited as one of the most important gardens of the twentieth century for its influence on the aesthetics of English garden design. The garden is organised as a series of enclosed spaces, each with a distinct character and colour scheme, connected by axes and paths that create a designed sequence of arrival and discovery. The most celebrated component is the White Garden, a planting of extraordinary sophistication using only white and silver plants to create a nocturnal quality of cool luminosity, but the Rose Garden, the Cottage Garden, the Herb Garden and the Orchard each demonstrate different aspects of Vita Sackville-West's planting philosophy, which combined intimate knowledge of plants with an instinctive sense of colour and texture. Vita Sackville-West wrote about Sissinghurst and its plants with great eloquence in her gardening column in The Observer and in her books, and the combination of the garden's physical quality with the literary intelligence behind it gives Sissinghurst a cultural significance beyond pure horticulture. The tower in which she wrote, still containing her writing room essentially as she left it, provides a direct connection to one of the most original and most poetic garden writers of the twentieth century. The surrounding Wealden landscape, the Elizabethan brick towers visible from across the park, complete an estate experience of the highest quality.