Vita designed the ten garden spaces like a play, evoking the seasons with successive flowering peaks. Vita further developed Jekyll's idea of "painting" perennial beds with colors like an artist with the planting of the legendary White Garden, a monochrome summer garden entirely in white.
Old roses held a thrilling fascination for the poet. At the beginning of the last century, these once-blooming shrubs were almost forgotten. In her columns in the Observer, Vita wrote passionately about moss roses, centifolias, remontant, and gallica roses, and caused a sensation in the gardening world with her rose collection in her old walled kitchen garden.
"Anyone who has once fallen under the spell of old roses will never be able to embrace new ones (...). As with friends, one learns to overlook their faults and appreciate their virtues." All the poems about roses one has read and portraits one has admired in paintings come back to mind at the sight of 'William Lobb,' 'Baron Girod de l'Ain,' 'Cardinal de Richelieu,' or the velvet rose Rosa gallica 'Tuscany.' In purple with a velvety sheen, in silky pink tones, and with a stunning fragrance, old roses evoke emotions. "Velvet rose. What a combination of words! (...). It teaches one something to gaze long and intently into a rose blossom, especially a rose like 'Tuscany,' which opens flat, revealing the tremulous and dusty gold of its central perfection."
Sissinghurst has become a myth. While visitors admire Hidcote Manor Garden, planned with all the finesse of the Arts and Crafts movement, Sissinghurst captures their hearts, despite the comparatively simple garden concept and Vita and Harold's low regard for building materials. Yet Sissinghurst is a private garden, an intimate place of retreat, as Harold emphasized in 1963: "(...) a garden should be for the enjoyment of its owner, not for display (...)."
In her novels and poems, such as "The Garden," Vita writes about her deep relationship with the garden. For her, gardening was an endless experiment. She loved England, and especially Kent, and grew up in Knole, the largest Elizabethan castle. She wanted her garden to be English, to blend seamlessly into the idyllic Kentish landscape, the Garden of England.
Vita loved living and gardening in her country garden. This still closely reflects the wishes of many garden lovers today. After Harold's death in 1967, Nigel Nicolson handed Sissinghurst over to the National Trust. Since then, the management, together with the Head Gardeners, has strived to preserve the intimate, private atmosphere of the garden—which is not easy with 145,000 visitors per year (2012).
Nevertheless, Sissinghurst is a must-see for garden and history buffs. Many ideas still recommended in gardening magazines and books on garden design were implemented almost 100 years ago by Vita, Harold, and their head gardeners Pamela Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger. The garden has now reached its peak. The goal of the head gardeners is to maintain Sissinghurst at a high horticultural standard as a source of inspiration for keen gardeners.
The recommended entry point to the garden is the climb up the tower. Vita's study appears as if she had just left it, with fresh flowers and a photograph of her beloved friend Virginia Woolf on the desk. The view from the roof terrace is breathtaking. Here, not only does Harold's architectural garden concept and Vita's abundance of plants become tangible from a bird's eye view, but it also makes it clear that Sissinghurst is more than just the garden.
The ruins of the Elizabethan house with its gardens, the adjacent farmhouse, and the oast houses, the traditional hop kiln houses with their white conical lace roofs, are set amidst the green Weald landscape of woods, streams, and farmland. Walking paths wind past two small lakes into the deciduous forest where Vita's dogs are buried. The view extends far over the fertile fields and meadows with old gnarled oaks into the park and hedge landscape, into the Garden of England. All the impressions, images, and stories about the personalities of the designers touch many people and make Sissinghurst a unique place.
