Kari-Astri Davies revisits a dream English country garden and works to achieve a continually colourful border
HERE’S HOPING FOR a dryish few weeks for ‘Juno’. She is a wonderful, palest pink, traditional blowsy cabbage rose. I first saw her at her glorious best in the Mottisfont rose garden in Hampshire. The one June flush of well-scented flowers is very susceptible to balling in wet weather: the outer petals seize up around the opening bud, and the flowers can’t open.
The last time I visited Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent was on a grey spring day more than 30 years ago. I recently revisited this iconic garden, designed in the 1930s by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. It was a hot, early June afternoon. A low hum of voices could be heard from small scattered groups. There was no slow shuffling along paths, politely muttering ‘excuse-me’s to hundreds of other visitors.
I have read that head gardener Troy Scott Smith is endeavouring to give the plantings a romantic, lavish-but-cottagey vibe, more in tune with Vita’s style. In the rondel garden, mounded old roses mingled with old-fashioned sweet peas on twiggy wigwams; lilac Hesperis matronalis; intense blue anchusa; and metallic purple balls of Allium christophii. The White Garden centrepiece, Rosa ‘Mulliganii’, wasn’t yet in flower, but peonies, cream lupins, white foxgloves, and Sir Cedric Morris’ Benton irises combined effortlessly.
Before the completion of Sissinghurst’s purchase, eager to get on with the garden, Vita is reputed to have planted a favourite rose, ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, against the South Cottage wall. I followed a path to the cottage. A swarm of bees were swirling around a corner of the roof. There was no sign of the scented, apricot-white climbing rose – only a bare brick wall. A gardener told me that a replacement Madame Alfred had recently been planted.
The newly reimagined Delos Garden is intended to evoke dry Mediterranean plantscapes growing among ancient ruins. Earlier summer flowering plants, such as euphorbias, will give way to lavenders, cistus, phlomis, and annual and biennial grasses. Great tuffets of pale perfumed pinks, Dianthus anatolicus, were splendid.
One favourite moment was putting my head up into the muted green and white cavern created by the fragrant panicles of a Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’ that cascaded over the wall along the Moat Walk.
Vita used to call garden v
