A Grecian garden for Sissinghurst

Dan Pearson created the garden together with National Trust horticulturalists.

A good news story is the re-creation of the Grecian Garden envisaged by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson at Sissinghurst in Kent. The World of Interiors reports:

‘This month we’re all going on a Grecian odyssey, as Cliff Richard didn’t sing, to Delos by way of the Weald of Kent. It is there, in the grounds of Sissinghurst Castle, that the landscape designer Dan Pearson and a team of National Trust horticulturists have spectacularly made good Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson’s vision for a Greek-style garden, which the couple were inspired to create after visiting the island in 1935. Squint and you might indeed be in the Aegean rather than southeast England, providing you focus on the naturalistic planting – pomegranate, cypress and cork-oak trees all feature – rather than on the Kentish architecture, climate and heavy clay. Vita and Harold sought to mitigate that backdrop by assembling debris in a vague approximation of Classical ruins, and they waged valiant battle against both the northerly aspect and the soil type. Alas, it wasn’t to be: the garden never did fulfil their expectations. In 1953 Vita wrote: ‘This has not been a success so far, but perhaps some day it will come right.’ Seven decades, 300 tonnes of gravel and 6,000 new perennials later, it finally has.’