Sissinghurst Castle - Part Three

The photo above is of the entrance range at Sissinghurst Castle, taken from inside the upper courtyard. The paved path, flanked by topiary yew trees, leads to the tower. The photograph was taken by Dave Parker and may not be reproduced in any way without his permission; his website features many beautiful photographs of Sissinghurst Castle.

When the Nicolson's bought the property, the only inhabitable parts of the castle were the entrance range, the tower, the South Cottage, and the Priest's House. At first they dreamed of creating buildings that would link the tower with the South Cottage and the entrance range, but these plans were abandoned as unaffordable, so they created a very unusual home among the remains of their castle and used the walls of the ruined parts of the Tudor manor house to separate their garden into "rooms". The idea of dividing up a garden into rooms was nothing new; it was characteristic of Renaissance gardens and revived by Gertrude Jeckyll and Edwin Lutyens in the gardens that they designed together between 1893 and 1912. What was unusual about the Nicolson's gardens at Sissinghurst Castle is that they lived in their garden as if the garden's rooms were actually the rooms of a grand manor house.

Via claimed the tower as her own private domain and no one ascended to tower stairs to Vita's writing room without her permission. If I had owned Sissinghurst. I would have transformed the entrance range into a home, but the Nicolson's weren't interested in doing that and they focused their attention on the south cottage and the priest's house. Part of the reason for this is that the entrance range had always been servant's quarters, while the South Cottage had been part of Baker family's living quarters in their manor house. Vita was descended from the Bakers and she always saw the South Cottage as the home of her ancestors. The upper floor of the South Cottage contained a bathroom and separate bedrooms for Harold and Vita, with their sitting room and Harold's writing room on the ground floor. The Priest's House had always been separate from the Tudor manor house; it probably dates from the seventeenth century when the Bakers were given permission to have their own chapel and chaplain. The Nicolson's had to wait until the Priest's House was restored before they moved into Sissinghurst Castle because the South Cottage didn't have a kitchen. The Priest's House, as restored by the Nicolsons, had a kitchen and dining room on the groundfloor; upstairs was a bathroom and bedrooms for their two sons.

During the two years that the tower, South Cottage, and Priest's House were being restored, the Nicolsons had kept their earlier home, Long Barn, but in April of 1932, Vita rented out Long Barn and Sissinghurst Castle became their home. In 1935, the entry range's stables were converted into what the Nicolson's called their "Big Room" (it is now called the Library). Harold was never happy with the proportions of this room, he felt that it would "always have about it a feeling of a hospital ward in some Turkish barrack". Vita did her best to try to compensate for the room's long, narrow proportions by arranging furniture but on the 20th of July she wrote to Harold saying that "the big room is a failure. Try as I might, I cannot get it to come together." The Big Room was never embraced as a family room, but when Vita bought a television in 1939, she installed it in the big room, so that the family and their servants could watch it after dinner.

While the big room did get some use when entertaining guests or watching television, the family mainly lived separate lives, with Harold in the South Cottage, Vita in her tower, and their sons, Ben and Nigel, in the Priest's House when home from school. Harold was usually only at Sissinghurst on weekends, spending the rest of the week in London. Vita's typical weekday routine was to rise at 8AM and look over the garden as she walked to the Priest's house for breakfast (Vita didn't cook, the Nicolson's always employed a cook). Vita would usually devote her mornings to writing and only began her "serious gardening" in the late afternoon, after the gardeners were done for the day (the Nicolsons employed 3 gardeners and a head gardener). After she was done with her gardening, Vita would bathe and change for dinner, then have drinks at the South Cottage before walking over the the Priest's House for dinner.

I can't think of any British garden that is similar to Sissinghurst, even though it is one of the most influential gardens of the twentieth century. Many gardens have plantings inspired by Sissinghurst, but the British climate isn't well suited to the way that the Nicolson's lived in their garden. The only garden that really reminds me of Sissinghurst is the sixteenth century garden of the Villa Lante, in Bagnia, Italy. Unlike other Renaissance villas, the Villa Lante consists of twin pavilions in a garden. the owner lived in one pavilion and the other was reserved for guests. The main dining area of the Villa Lante was outdoors, in the shade of trees; this was quite practical, since the villa wasn't lived in during the winter and Italy has dry summers. The Nicolsons lived year-round at Sissinghurst, and Harold's complaints during a cold spell just before Christmas of 1945, make it clear just how unpleasant life at Sissinghurst could be. The pipes in the South Cottage had frozen, so in order to shave Harold had to walk across the garden to the Priest's House, when he got there, he discovered that he had left his razor behind so he had to trudge back through the snow to get it, and then return to the Priest's House. Harold wrote that this convinced him "how bitter it was to inhabit a house which was so cold and draughty and which entailed having to shave in a distant cottage".

The rest of the articles in this series will be about the individual parts of the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, but I felt that it was important to devote an article to how the Nicolsons lived at Sissinghurst Castle, because while most gardens are located next to their owners homes, the gardens of Sissinghurst were created within the ruins of a home and the Nicolsons lived among the ruins as if it was still a manorhouse. The courtyard between the entrance range and the tower served as their entrance hall, and the garden next to the Priest's House was their dining room whenever the weather allowed, while Harold and Vita used the Cottage Garden next to the South Garden as their sitting room. It was a common sight to see the Nicolson's formally attired butler carrying silver trays between the Priest's House and the South Cottage. The Nicolsons created their own unique little world.

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