We visited
Sissinghurst Castle again on Sunday. It's a National Trust property that we've been to several times before, although it was the first time for little Finley and the friends we'd gone to meet. We are very lucky that there are so many of these properties relatively nearby to us as we visit and revisit them all the time, watching them develop and change throughout the seasons. I've posted about one of our previous visits (
you can see it here), which was in October 2019, and it's really interesting to see the difference in planting and the flowers filling the abundant flower beds.
The colour schemes seem to have remained the same, lots of purple planting apart from one bright hot orangey garden and the white garden. There is a 'new' garden which was still under construction in my 2019 post, the Delos garden, inspired by Vita & Harold's visit to the Greek island of Delos in 1935 whilst on a cruise. They had built a version of this garden themselves but it wasn't very successful as it was in the wrong location (for warmth and sunshine) and they weren't particularly knowledgeable on Mediterranean plants so the garden was a bit of a disaster.
Using letters and photographs from the archives the team at Sissinghurst have rebuilt the garden as Vita and Harold had been dreaming of and it is absolutely beautiful! Lots of white stones and rocks, bits of 'ruined' stone fragments and delicate planting with a lovely mix of colours throughout, made all the more vivid by the white stones.
The orchard is a little bit different now. Previously we could walk through the cut grass surrounding the apple trees but this time it was roped off, apart from set pathways through, and has more of a wild meadow look to it. I remember coming here just after it re-opened after the COVID lockdowns and the orchard was roped off and wild looking with a sign next to it saying that the gardeners had all been furloughed and were catching up with the maintenance - I wonder whether they decided to just leave the wild meadow there?
There's a gorgeous lawned walk at the bottom of the gardens which has a wall along one side, absolutely covered in white Wisteria. We'd just missed the absolute heyday of it as the flowers were turning slightly and getting that browned, crispy look to them, but the smell was still amazing and the bees were loving it.
A lot of the plants in the gardens were repeated plants - Lupins, Irises, Alliums, Snapdragons, Peonies, Roses, California Poppies, Sweet Peas, Aquilegia etc, but they were all in the colours of the scheme for their area so the range of colours was spectacular! I have never seen such glorious Irises!
There's not much of the building open, one room off to the side is all dark and stately home-esque which you can pop in to, and there's Vita's writing room in the tower (plus the tower roof) but the rest is private or holiday homes or offices I think. The outside of the red brick buildings is very pretty though with lots of climbing plants; Clematis, Roses, Climbing Hydrangea and Wisteria.
I was just continually snapping photos on my phone as we walked past, gasping at pretty much every flower and running over to various sections to get the best angle or pack in as many layers of planting as possible. I realised when we left that we missed the vegetable garden but Finley had been getting restless and we were peckish so we had wandered back to the converted barns for some lunch. I'll leave you with a selection of these photos though - lots put into montages to make them easier to post!
