Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  An aerial photograph taken in 1932. It shows the new wall by the Priest’s House garden (later to become the White Garden), but the north wall is still to be built and there is, as yet, no Powys wall. Vegetables are growing in what became the Rose Garden.

  None of Harold’s linear, formal structure was going to be straightforward at Sissinghurst. Although the site was flat, it was not symmetrical. You can see his challenge very clearly in the 1932 aerial photograph and in any plan of the garden (see here), showing that none of the spaces was a simple rectangle. The site is full of what Vita called ‘minor crookedness’. As she said on describing her first few visits: ‘The walls were not at all at right angles to one another: the courtyard was not rectangular but coffin shaped; the Tower was not opposite the main entrance’, nor parallel with the front range. The Top Courtyard is not a true rectangle, the space between the Moat Walk and the Nuttery is not a rectangle either.

  But Harold was up to the challenge. By means of rulers and graph paper, his design manages to skilfully camouflage the eccentricities of the place. As Anne Scott-James describes it in Sissinghurst: The Making of a Garden, ‘paths had to be twisted, rectangles adjusted, circles bent, enclosures pushed this way and that, to achieve miracles of optical illusion’. The end result is that, standing above it on the Tower roof, you can see its awkwardnesses, but as you stand in the garden you’re totally unaware of any anomaly.

  In the first couple of years the whole scheme remained at the paper stage. Before anything could be actually planted, they had to clear vast amounts – centuries – of rubbish. There was an ‘appalling mess of rubbish to be cleared away before we could undertake any planting at all’. Imagine the archaeology that would have been undertaken nowadays; but most of the stuff was to be dumped – rusty iron, ‘old bedsteads, old plough-shares, old cabbage stalks, old broken down earth closets, old matted wire and mountains of sardine tins, all muddled up in a tangle of bindweed, nettles and ground elder’.

  Centuries of rubbish and lean-to cottages attached to the main buildings had to be cleared before gardening could begin. These are both views of the clutter in the Top Courtyard at the time of Harold and Vita’s arrival.

  Vita clearing ivy from the Elizabethan walls, 1930.

  The Lower Courtyard – overgrown – with a greenhouse in the southwest corner.

  More useful was the odd lump of stone, as well as sinks and bits of fireplaces from the sixteenth-century ruins. All of these were carefully preserved and many of them used later. The sinks were made into trough gardens and put on brick plinths along the east face of the western Top Courtyard wall; they resurrected the fireplace for the Big Room; and other chunks of stone were used to create the Erechtheum – a temple-like pagoda – on the east side of the Priest’s House in 1933. This was the place where the family ate outside when it was warm enough in the summer.

  There was also the inevitable destructive first stage before they could get on with the creating, and they had two cottages and a lean-to demolished in the Top Courtyard, as well as a ramshackle greenhouse taken down from the right-hand Tower Lawn wall.

  Almost every building needed work on walls, floors and roofs, and Harold, with the help of Powys, set about this in their first year, restoring and repointing the walls and the buildings to make somewhere good to live. They loved good, authentic – ideally local – materials but their restorations were basic: high finish was not their thing. Vita used to say frequently that Sissinghurst was ‘not a winter resort’. The lifestyle of trooping between one building and the next was ‘idyllic in summer but demanded goodly amounts of English fortitude in the cold and wet’. The style of interiors they chose, with walls stripped to the brick and simple wooden floors, could also be very cold and draughty. Fitted carpets and plush cosiness was not their way.

  Inside Long Barn – a classic Vita interior – full of things from Knole and her travels.

  Their first priority was to restore the Tower and make Vita’s writing room on the first floor. The other floors were, to start with, used for storage. The Tower became the centre of Vita’s life for the next thirty years, and her writing room is where she remains more present now than anywhere outside it. This was Vita’s most private place, which Nigel said he visited only half a dozen times in his whole life when Vita was at Sissinghurst, and Harold went up there not much more. They would call from the bottom of the stairs if they needed her. Nigel tried to work up there after Vita died, but her presence was too strong and he retired back to his workroom in the south wing of the front range.

  The family with their dog, Rebecca, in 1932, at the base of the Tower – the first place to be restored and made habitable.

  Vita at her desk in 1932 in the newly renovated Tower.

  You can see lots of detail of Vita’s desk, where she spent so much time, in the photograph by Edwin Smith (below), taken just after she died. As Adam wrote in his book Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History, everything in this room ‘is rich and faded, a fraying of stuff that was once valuable and is now merely treasured. Nothing here was ever renewed. It arrived and, as soon as it arrived, like a picked flower laid on a desk, it began to fade. Vita allowed her possessions to age, silks to wear, wood to darken, terracotta to chip and fail.’ ‘Her possessions must grow old with her,’ Nigel wrote. ‘She must be surrounded by evidence of time.’ This was fundamental to her style, both inside and out.

  Edwin Smith’s photograph of Vita’s desk soon after her death in early summer 1962.

  Vita’s workroom in the Tower – books, tapestries and a mirror from Knole on the wall.

  A dilapidated old oak table.

  There are signs of this all around the room: a chipped turquoise tile on which a vase can sit. And another, on the other table, a brown and amber medieval floor tile, made of English clay. There’s a fire in the corner and the same corduroy sofa sitting in front of it, a sofa carried up there on her first day and never moved, with the same rather mean electric heater which she had on almost perpetually. There’s Chinese amber, jade and amethyst trees and ceramic animals from Persia. Vita wanted everything in her room to be eclectic, worn yet rich, the whole interior feeling old as soon as it was made. One can forget that now, with everything muted by age, and the odd bright or rich splash of colour. It’s not due to the weathering of the last seventy years: it was like that from the start, and purposefully created. She liked this look around her in all her rooms, and that’s the sort of garden she wanted to create too, nothing shiny or new.

  Ben in the early days when they were still camping out.

  The South Cottage was next in the restoration programme, making Vita’s bedroom and Harold’s writing room, and then adding his bedroom after a couple of years. Vita’s bedroom was covered in layers of Victorian wallpaper, completely obscuring the fireplace – imagine the joy when they found it – but she wanted the walls stripped back to bare brick, the floor to just boards, with rugs. This room is best with a roaring fire filling the hearth and lots of candles. That’s how Vita loved it: we still have her candlesticks and candles in sconces on the walls. Then you can revel in imagining what it would have been like as a bedroom for one of Elizabeth’s court, and for Vita nearly four centuries later. We have tried to keep her room as close as possible to how it was when she died, and have recently moved things back, which we know from photographs were there in her day.

  Vita’s bedroom in South Cottage, photographed by Edwin Smith just after she died. It still looks much like this today.

  It has a powerful atmosphere. If you sit quietly there on your own, you can almost see an Elizabethan lady being dressed for dinner and, after her, Vita standing smoking by the fire. In its mixture of raw brick and old tarnished mirrors, richly embroidered, rather ragged seventeenth-century textiles and tapestries hanging against the brick, it has a strong characteristic feel. This is where you can sense the Vita aura.

  The Nicolsons also restored the Priest’s House; Ben and Nigel slept there for the first time in April 1
931. This is constructed from the same narrow brick. Its first-floor chamber has a similar atmosphere and appearance to the bedroom in the South Cottage, and it was here that Vita died early in the summer of 1962. Their kitchen was here, and if Vita was going to be brought meals in bed and be looked after by the cook – Mrs Staples and her daughters Pat and Jo – it was easier for all for Vita to be in this spare room, rather than everyone having to traipse across the garden carrying trays of food to the South Cottage, so she had to move.

  A wooden settle with silk cushions, which sat by the fire in Vita’s bedroom. This can be seen in the picture of her bedroom here.

  There was deliberately no guest room at Sissinghurst. If people came to stay – which they rarely did – they would have been offered Ben’s or Nigel’s beds if they were not at home.

  When they arrived, what was a stable in the front range was converted into the Big Room (now called the Library by the National Trust), their sitting room and their most public room for when they might entertain. They put in the big window to the north, and created the fireplace. Lots of the things here – the sconces and the furniture – came from Knole or were copies. Vita’s mother had organised for the estate staff at Knole to give Vita and Harold copies of the seventeenth-century sconces from the Colonnade – one of Vita’s favourite rooms – as their wedding present. They were hung here. The mirrors in the Big Room and the wig stands were also copies of seventeenth-century things at Knole. The fireplace was made from remnants of an Elizabethan one they found in the garden. Lots of the ceramics and glass here – and in her tower – were brought back from Constantinople, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, adding to the overall aged, eclectic feel.

  Vita and Harold kept their first home, Long Barn, until 1932 (when they let it), but they made working visits to Sissinghurst, usually staying at the George in Cranbrook or the Bull in Sissinghurst village. Their first night spent at Sissinghurst itself was early in October 1930, on two camp beds in the upper room of the Tower, putting up sheets of cardboard in the unglazed windows to keep the rain out. Harold did a hilarious BBC broadcast in November that year about the terrible night they had spent there, eating all his least favourite things – ‘sardines, soup from a tablet, cheese wedges and tongue (tinned)’. By 9 April 1932, the buildings were nearly ready and they finally moved in.

  The Herb Garden – the outermost garden room, enclosed on all four sides by yew hedges, fundamental to Sissinghurst’s overall design.

  Once the outdoor site had been cleared, Harold came into his own and set about the actual laying-out of the garden. He spent much time standing on top of the Tower thinking and rethinking, but by 1932 he had a complete plan that never altered.

  There were two fundamentals to his design – long distant views, with secluded garden rooms opening off them. The hedge lines for the views were his first priority and were laid out during his weekends away from London, with Nigel often at the other end of his measuring tape. Everything was done by eye, homemade and handmade – no landscape architect, no surveys, no spirit levels, just the two of them with a pad of graph paper, a pencil, some bamboo canes and some string.

  Nigel and Ben on the oak bench at the base of Vita’s Tower in 1939.

  As Vita wrote, and they both clearly thought: ‘Hedges are always an important feature in any garden, however small, however large. Hedges are the things that cut off one section of the garden from another; they play an essential part in the general design.’ They create surprise, containment, a sense of arrival, a narrative for anyone walking through the garden, and were fundamental to their initial design. From the start they planted box – throughout the Priest’s House garden (now the White Garden) as well as in the vegetable patch (now the Rose Garden), and in the Lower Courtyard where we have photographs of young box plants, just put in.

  The Yew Walk was planted in 1932, as was the yew Rondel (a sort of hedged circle, named by them after the drum of an oast house) in what was to become the Rose Garden, followed by the Lime Walk and the hornbeam hedge, all in the same year. They both loved yew, beech, holly and hornbeam, although, in the end, no beech was used at Sissinghurst.

  An aerial view of Sissinghurst taken in the early 1960s, showing the abundant garden at its peak, and the importance to the garden’s design of the yew hedges, as well as the ‘inherited’ walls and buildings.

  A Country Life photograph taken during the war. Irish yews line the path from the entrance arch to Vita’s Tower. These were planted when they were quite well grown to provide instant architecture for the new garden.

  As well as hedges, they both liked sentinel plants – topiary – not elaborate shapes, but vertical lines to emphasise points in the garden. These are equivalent to the chunky oak tables in all their rooms, substantial, elegant, unfussy, essential in the rhythm of the space. The Irish yews were planted in the Top Courtyard, also in 1932, and four Irish yews were added in a square at the centre of the Cottage Garden two years later. If you stand in these two gardens now and imagine them without these great green pillars, they’d be half the places they are. Their architectural presence throughout winter as well as summer stops the gardens from being simple plateaux of plants and grass and makes them whole worlds in themselves, mini-landscapes with these crucial verticals breaking the plane.

  The Moat Walk in 1931.

  With his structural planting, Harold created a series of five long-distance views, just as they’d planned. The first and main axis of the new garden had the Tower at its heart. It runs from the first point of arrival, through the entrance arch (reopened in 1931) and the Tower, then through a narrow gap in the yew hedge and down to the moat. Harold designed a wide York stone path from the entrance arch to the Tower in 1932. He also added the statue at the end of this view, of Dionysus, but it was not installed till after the war, in 1946. This is also the end point of another view running down the Moat Walk with its wide grass path from Sissinghurst Crescent – a semicircular brick platform with a shaped box hedge on the east side of the Cottage Garden – to the moat’s edge. The Moat Walk was turfed in 1932 and Sissinghurst Crescent built in the same year.

  A postcard of Sissinghurst, showing the Yew Walk newly planted.

  The third – and hugely important – axis is the Yew Walk, linked to a box-edged path to the south, which together bisect almost the whole garden from north to south, planted in 1932. To line up the double hedge for planting, Nigel stood at the southern end waving a flag, with Harold at the other shouting where to put it, to mark the correct central point.

  The view from the Tower Lawn looking south to the Bacchante statue.

  The fourth viewpoint runs from the Priest’s House garden (now the White Garden), through the Bishop’s Gate and across the Lower Courtyard to finish in the Lime Walk at the Bacchante statue (a Bacchante is one of the dancing-girl followers of Dionysus – called Bacchus in Ancient Rome). This statue was formerly part of the Wallace Collection and a present from Vita’s mother, and was very sadly stolen from the garden in spring 2013.

  The Bacchante is also the start of the final viewpoint, down the lime and hornbeam avenue of the Lime Walk, and continuing into the Nuttery. The filberts there were planted in 1900 before the Nicolsons arrived, but Harold used the avenue of hazels and tied it in with his vista to extend the Lime Walk. The nut trees were thinned and pruned to link in with this avenue.

  As Tony Lord says in his book Gardening at Sissinghurst, the ‘apparent simplicity’ of the overall layout ‘is deceptive, leading some to suggest that there is little to the design, that the Nicolsons just threw up a few walls and hedges to complete existing enclosures and scattered a few statues’. He goes on: ‘Consider as an example the axis from the White Garden to the head of the Lime Walk: this entire sequence is built up from one original feature that predated their arrival: the doorway at the south end of the Lower Courtyard. This determined the position of the Bishop’s Gate and the wall that contains it, the clairvoyee at the farthest end of the W
hite Garden, the Rondel and the statue at the end of the Lime Walk.’ ‘It is a tribute to [Harold Nicolson’s] skill that visitors today find it so logical that it is hard to believe its enclosures and axes were not always there.’ This difference between old and new is now brilliantly blurred.

  Harold could then move on to the arrangement of the garden ‘rooms’, to create that sense of privacy that both he and Vita so much wanted. Privacy was key, he wrote: ‘I admit that Versailles, Courances and Villandry are superb achievements of the architectural school of gardening. Yet a garden is intended for the pleasure of its owner and not for ostentation. Nobody could sit with his family on the parterre at Versailles and read the Sunday papers while sipping China tea.’ Harold called the rooms a ‘succession of privacies’, each surrounded by walls or high hedges around an enclosure that is formal in shape – the Top Courtyard, the Tower Lawn, the Rose Garden with its Rondel yew hedge, the Lime Walk, the Cottage Garden, the Herb Garden and the White Garden.