Sissinghurst Castle Garden

Interesting facts

The famous White Garden had a practical side too: its pale blooms caught the dusk light as Vita and Harold walked from their bedrooms to dinner in another building.

When Sackville-West bought the estate in 1930 for £12,375, the house had no electricity, running water or drains, and the plot was mostly weeds and chicken runs.

Even before the purchase deeds were signed, Sackville-West planted the climbing rose 'Madame Alfred Carrière' against the wall of the South Cottage.

For all its fame, the garden covers only about five acres within an estate of roughly 450 acres of farmland and woods.

Some 200 rose varieties were grown here, including 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain', which had vanished from commerce until Sackville-West dug one up at an old nursery.

Her tower study was off limits to almost everyone except her dogs; her son Nigel recalled going up only about six times in thirty years.

In that tower room Nigel Nicolson found his mother's manuscript about her affair with Violet Trefusis, which became the basis of his 1973 book Portrait of a Marriage.

The Purple Border deliberately broke Gertrude Jekyll's rule against massing purple flowers together, and garden writers now count it among the courtyard's highlights.

From 1959 to 1991 the garden was run by two joint head gardeners, Pamela Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger, whose work is credited with much of its later renown.

The historian Edward Gibbon was stationed at Sissinghurst with the Hampshire militia when it held French prisoners in the Seven Years' War, and complained bitterly about the dirt.

Why it is worth it

A slender Elizabethan tower of rose-red brick rises from the Weald of Kent, and around it lies a sequence of walled and hedged enclosures, each planted as a separate room. Sissinghurst Castle Garden was made from 1930 onwards by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and her husband, the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, and it became one of the most influential gardens of the 20th century. Nicolson drew the plan, a frame of long axial walks closed by focal points, while Sackville-West did the planting; she described it as small geometric gardens opening off the walks the way rooms open off the corridors of a great house. The garden is listed Grade I on England's register of historic parks and gardens.

The buildings are older than the garden by four centuries. In the 1530s Sir John Baker, a Privy Councillor of Henry VIII, built the brick gatehouse range, and in the 1560s his son Richard raised a vast courtyard house entered through the four-storey tower, where he received Elizabeth I in 1573. The family's fortunes collapsed after the Civil War. During the Seven Years' War the decaying house held some 3,000 French prisoners, and it was then that the name "castle" took hold, although it never was one; graffiti left by the prisoners was found under later plaster in 2018. Most of the mansion was pulled down around 1800, and the remains served as a workhouse and then as farm labourers' housing. Sackville-West, who had lost her family home of Knole because it passed only through the male line, saw Sissinghurst as a link to her ancestors: a Baker daughter had married into the Sackvilles in 1554.

Within the walls, the White Garden, completed in the winter of 1949–1950, is the most celebrated room, planted only in white, silver, grey and green and widely copied since. The Purple Border, the Rose Garden with its collection of old garden roses, the Moat Walk, the Yew Walk and the orchard each have their own character. Sackville-West kept her writing room at the top of the tower, and it is preserved much as she left it. After her death in 1962 the estate passed to the National Trust, which took it over in 1967.

Getting there

The garden lies near the village of Sissinghurst, close to the small town of Cranbrook; Maidstone is about 17 km away. The nearest airport by straight-line distance is London Southend (SEN), about 51 km away but on the far side of the Thames estuary; London Gatwick (LGW) is at a similar distance, roughly 54 km, without the river crossing.

From the encyclopaedia

Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, a poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, an 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 was ranked 42nd on the list of the Trust's most-visited sites in the 2021–2022 season, with over 150,000 visitors.

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Sissinghurst Castle Garden

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia