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Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962)Author and Garden DesignerVita Sackville-West was born as the only child of Baron Lionel Edward Sackville and Victoria Josepha Dolores Catalina, a Spanish dancer. She wrote her first ballads at the age of 11. Eight novellas and five plays followed between 1906 and 1910 alone. In 1913, she married the diplomat and critic Harold Nicolson, and gave birth to two sons, Benedict and Nigel. The couple lived for many years in Persia before returning to live in England, first at the Long Barn estate near Sevenoaks in Kent and later at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. The couple restored Sissinghurst lovingly. Vita had discovered her talent for garden design at an early stage and devoted some books to it. This talent made the garden at Sissinghurst into the attraction that it is today. Her deep friendship with the author Virginia Woolf, who was ten years older, was of great significance. It began in the middle of the twenties and lasted until Virginia Woolf’s suicide (1941). Today, Sissinghurst Castle is world renowned and is one of the most popular gardens in England. It became famous through the essays of “gardening correspondent” Vita Sackville-West in the Observer and through her radio programme on the BBC. The garden’s design is based on a series of rooms, each with its own character and its own colour or theme. The rooms are bordered by high, clipped hedges and redbrick walls, the foundation walls of the former castle. These man-sized walls are deliberately used in the garden’s design as they feature a wide variety of climbing plants. Harold Nicolson’s design of the garden and Vita Sackville-West’s planting of it were strongly influenced by the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens as well as by the garden at Hidcote Manor. Sissinghurst was opened to the public as early as 1938. The National Trust took over the property in 1967.
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