Sibylle's Blog @mohn-images.com: Visiting Sissinghurst Castle Garden

Visiting Sissinghurst Castle Garden seems like stepping into the reference book on perfect English gardening. The garden is so well known from Vita Sackville-West's writings about her creation which she planned together with her husband Harold Nicholson, that a visit feels a bit like an inspection round, checking off images in your head: the white garden, the rose garden, the lime walk, the nut garden .... Her columns on gardening, compiled in her four "In my garden" books in the cycle of the seasons and Tony Lord's excellent photographic book and all the later books about it helped me develop my first own garden twenty years ago. What to grow unter hazelnuts? Which old roses can be recommended? I tried to obtain a Stewartia pseudocamellia, Millium effusum or Aster frikartii "Mönch" ... which most gardeners in Germany had never heard of then.

But books and written words are permanently fixed, while a garden is always developing and provides fleeting images only. Great expectations for the visit, and also slight worries whether the gardens would be able to live up to these expectations, decades after the property joined the National Trust's portfolio and the creator is gone.
These are photographs I made during our visit in June.

The White Garden:

view from the tower towards the white garden and the Kentish countryside

Peony-shaped white poppy "White Cloud";

A gardener told me, the heads are so heavy that they droop in rains and even here on this picture when it was dry. I will try them nevertheless ...

Rosa mulliganii on the pergola not yet in flower

The Rose Garden:

I had not seen these Allium christophii in such mass plantings before - usually they are used in singles. These clouds though look great! Another idea to try out...

A view from the top: