April showers?  Torrential downpours, broken by bright sunshine – we huddled under NT lost property umbrellas, oblivious to the weather just happy to have this opportunity of seeing some hidden corners of Sissinghurst not generally on view to the public!  We took refuge under the arch in the Tudor front range of buildings with Alexis Datta, Sissinghurst’s Head Gardener since 1995.  She came to Sissinghurst as Assistant Head Gardener in 1991, the year in which Sybille Kreutzberger (who, together with Pamela Schwerdt, was Head Gardener to Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson) retired.  Alexis  gave us an excellent history of the garden and then out we went into the rain to take a look.

First,  the Spring Garden (or Lime Walk, as it is also known).  “My life’s work “as Harold Nicolson termed it, was at its glorious best this afternoon, the colours more vibrant in the low light: scillas, anenomes, Fritillaria meleagris and the Crown Imperial Fritillaria imperialis-  tulips, tulips and more glorious tulips, giant snowdrops, muscari (grape hyacinths) – it was ablaze with reds, yellows, purples, whites and blues set off beautifully by the bright yellow/green of Euphorbia polychroma– wonderful; we stopped caring about the rain!  A quick stop in the rose garden, the bareness of April giving us the opportunity to see at close quarters how the gardeners tie down the stems onto hazel hoops (from their own hazel coppice which we visited later) so that the plant feels under stress and therefore flowers prolifically.   This Sissinghurst technique is taught to gardeners everywhere who come to down to Kent and learn how to do it.  They do something similar with their fig trained against the wall behind the Rose Garden where they tie-in loops, causing it to produce more leaves and give a dense cover to the wall.

A door in the garden wall was opened and we trooped through to explore the potting shed (unbelievably small), the glasshouses with row upon row of seedlings, cuttings growing on and, outside, cold frames and stock beds from which to replenish any flagging specimens in the garden.  Sissinghurst produces almost all of its own plants (except roses, which come from David Austin) plus plenty to sell on to the public via the plant shop (they plan to increase the scale of growing for sale over the next few years).  Peat-free compost is used (they have been peat-free since 2000 in-line with National Trust policy).   Masses of lawn maintenance equipment and machinery!  The gardeners spend an enormous amount of time on lawn upkeep as it is the lawns that take the wear and tear of 2000 visitors a day at peak season.  They require regular sprinkling, oversowing and a  high mowing height all part of the maintenance programme (even more vital with the hosepipe ban just announced as this ban will affect the lawns most of all – no watering of the lawns will be allowed and if, as they anticipate, certain high-traffic areas start to dry out and brown-off, the Moat Walk for example, then they will simply have to close certain pathways to the public to “rest” the turf).

Anybody can sign up to attend one of these events led by Head Gardeners at National Trust properties – there is a charge (not cheap!) but the time spent in the garden, when it is closed to the public, is very special – it is extremely peaceful and full of birdsong, also a fantastic opportunity to ask questions, chat to the gardeners and take photo’s without people wandering into the frame – almost impossible at Sissinghurst on public days.

He started very young and was always, in his words ‘gardening on the edge of nature’ as his family restored a severely neglected old garden surrounding their home -  uncovering, in the process, all kinds of long-lost treasures.  Dan recounted how he learned, at a very young age, to strike a balance with nature which will always have the upper hand.  He began to understand the provenance of various plant species through a family friend who travelled extensively throughout Europe and returned with specimens to plant at home.

Through his own travels (he showed slides of New Zealand), he learned to take a good look at the landscape and the broader setting of a garden and to observe the way that plants occur in nature – often on a very different scale to that which we can achieve in our own gardens – - a slide showed a vast drift of Stipa catching the wind in New Zealand and captured the wave of movement created on a vast scale.  He spoke of the huge amount to be learned from observing plants in areas untouched by man where layers and layers of plants coexist.  From this, ideas flow.

Dan’s involvement with the romantic Italian garden of Torrecchia near Rome lasted for over 10 years helping an Italian couple create their dream garden with the ruins of an 8th century village as the stunning backdrop.  The brief was for cool whites and greens and images followed, including the white Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’, white penstemons, white plumbago, white mophead hydrangeas and the stunning rambling rose Mme Alfred Carriere running riot up the ruins.

Gardeners Cottage near Henley was on a very different scale and started off as two old walled gardens with the brief being for easy maintenance.  Dan left openings in the walls instead of putting in gates so that one area flowed into the next and the planting certainly flowed.  Erigeron, alcaea, alchemilla, Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ (wonderful effect with Vernonicastrum virginum album spiking up through the hydrangea) -  self-seeding everywhere to give quick establishment of new planting,  with perfume and movement and a generally relaxed air.  The second walled garden was planted with fescue grass in order to create a sculpted landscape with a hill and a hollowed-out dip below in which to lie and look up at the stars!  Either side borders of long grass with paths mown through them.  Heaven!

On Hokkaido, the most northern island of Japan, Dan was commissioned to design the Tokachi Millennium Forest to be a sustainable project for the next thousand years with trees as the focal theme.   A vast and beautiful area of former forests which had been plundered for woodpulp, it had subsequently been colonised by native bamboo.  Having repeatedly strimmed this down every year, the native wildflowers including trilliums, cardiocrinum, astilbes, philipendula and rodgersiae  – and trees – were given the light and space to grow with the trees eventually establishing a canopy which prevents the bamboo taking a strong hold again.  Wooden walkways were made through the forest.  A 5-hectare open space was sculped into ridges and grassed over, to echo the shape of the mountains beyond – a beautiful slide of these undulating ridges covered in snow in wintertime.  The snow doesn’t melt until the end of April in this area and therefore, in the Garden which Dan created, there is nothing to see and then very fast growth during May.  The Japanese people love Western plants and Dan used a mix of native plants and western, eg. combing Veronicastrum sibiricum – a native, with North American varieties of astilbe.  Interesting to note that they collect the seedheads of the non-natives before they can scatter and risk being borne into the wild.  The whole show very intense and concentrated into the May-August short flowering period.

Great to see how Dan developed his former London garden which he started in 1997 and left recently for a smallholding in the West Country.  The use of climbers to make a big, annual statement: Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ in the front garden scrambling up the east-facing front of the house, a white wisteria floribunda up the back of the house.   Bamboo hedges in the back garden help to soak up noise from outside (Dan used a black bamboo and stripped the stems to dramatic effect).   Water bowls reflect the skies and right down the end of the garden a special area for experimenting with a whole range of plants collected from all over – to try them out in an informal setting.

Dan took questions from the audience including one about his new smallholding: he told us that he is moving slowly and not yet sure how much he wants to make his presence felt on the space;  he has planted a blossom wood of 400 trees for the bees, an enormous vegetable garden and rows of flowers, like trials, to see what grows best and get ideas of what to use later including a rows of different types of rose and also willows.  Good advice, this, to proceed with caution when taking on a new space/garden……. in my experience, your ideas certainly do keep changing as different influences come and go. Patience is the key and keeping the bigger, longterm picture in mind rather than seeking instant effect.

Successional planting has been used to great effect everywhere in the garden with different areas taking turns to be the star performer at different times of the year.  Silver and variegated leaves bring light into shady areas, hardy geraniums are widely used together with fennels and hesperis, as are silvery-leaved hebes with white flowers.  A dusky purple clematis weaves through a magnolia tree and bright blue clematis up the ancient walls of the house.  Ancient yew hedging offers a stately backdrop to the more formal area of the garden in front of the house with both long, herbaceous borders and a circular sundial garden.  Alchemilla spills out of the cracks in the stone flags in front of the house.  The secret garden around the pond is surrounded in early spring by gorgeous candelabra primulae at the water’s edge, interrupted by clumps of Arum lilies.  This is a stunning, privately-owned garden, tucked away down a country lane in the depths of the Sussex countryside – a joy to discover!

With all of his usual verve and enthusiasm, Fergus gave us a ‘guided tour’ of Great Dixter, accompanied by slides, rapidly firing off plant names (which we hastily scribbled down), sharing with us precious memories of gardening with the late Christopher Lloyd.  Memorable slides: gourds grown on the towering compost heaps then stored in the bath, the emphasis on ‘change’, both throughout the year (the soft colours of the spring borders giving way to the later, vivid colours; the pot displays by the porch) and from year to year (the ‘experiments’ with different plants in the Exotic Garden); the slide of Christopher Lloyd’s neatly folded richly-coloured shirts echoed in the next slide of the vibrant colours of the Long Border!  He explained that, rather than opening the whole house up to the public in the years since Christopher Lloyds death, instead part is still kept private so that garden students can live there – “going to bed and getting up with the garden” – what a great picture that conjures up of going out early into the garden on a misty morning before anyone else is up and about.

Anna Pavord reminded us not to lose that feeling of pure joy in our gardening – not to be too tied to the “jobs that we need to bedoing this month” school of thought (a format which many articles in magazines and TV programmes seem to use).  She is absolutely right, of course – we can get so bogged down with what we are told we should be doing that we can forget to simply stop, look and enjoy all the sights, scents and sounds of our garden.  As she also observed , gardening is a fantastic way for us to express ourselves creatively and to, literally, make a better place, both for ourselves and to share with others.

Movingly, Anna spoke of the garden she had restored and created over 40 years in a  Dorset rectory and how hard it was to leave, finally, her family having grown up and it being time to move on.  As she said, it is neither the house nor one’s garden which is so desparately hard to leave but rather the wonderful memories of family life over the years – as those of us who have moved on and left our beloved gardens behind will testify to!

Anna urged us to think carefully about subsequent seasons when planning our planting (and quoted Christopher Lloyd, who said, scathingly but truthfully “any fool can make a spring garden!”)  Good foliage is of paramount importance and we should ask ourselves the question: What does it look like the rest of the year when it is not flowering?  For example, colombines have great foliage whereas tulips don’t!   It is almost like keeping a kind of relay race of growing, Anna continued, listing peonies and euphorbias as having good foliage – with any colours working very well against the lime green of the euphorbias.  She mentioned Dicentra ‘Stuart Boothman’ as having interesting foliage – similar to artemesia but stronger.  The beautiful leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium (which starts flowering in July) last year round.

Questions were taken from the audience and Fergus explained, in response to one, how it was Christopher’s mother, Daisy, who was instrumental in starting the ‘Dixter style’, such as bedding out annuals.  Christopher developed this further with his own unique, creative and free-thinking approach – juxtaposing wildly clashing colours, taking out Daisy Lloyd’s rose garden and replacing it with the glorious Exotic Garden.  Fergus spoke of how excited he is at present with meadow gardening and often takes a ‘detour’ via the meadow – just as he remembers Christopher doing via the Exotic Garden.  Anna was asked what she had underplanted her beloved ferns with – she recommended wood anemones, cyclamen and scillas.  To finish, Anna left us with a positive, still on the theme of leaving one garden and starting another,  namely that we should see the ‘loss’ of the one garden being offset by the opportunities presented by the new garden.  Interesting if the underlying soil is completely different, as in her case where she has moved from heavy clay to greensand – both nutritious and free-draining.  Finally, Fergus reminded us that we should try to use the landscape around the garden and merge the edges of the garden into that landscape – ‘so that the two shake hands’ – wonderful imagery!

Friends for over 20 years, they both spoke with such obvious passion – it was incredibly infectious and inspirational.

The garden consists of greenhouses  (a feature of the garden since at least 1685 when the diarist John Evelyn wrote of the innovative heated glasshouses), a range of buildings along the north side containing the offices, lecture rooms and superb cafe, and divided by gravel paths into quadrants each containing the narrow, rectangular beds which were an original design feature of the garden.  Trees break up the formal design, including ancient yews, Judas Tree Cercis siliquastrum, Quercis coccifera – a spiny leaved evergreen oak from the Mediterrancean and the largest olive tree growing outside in Britain.

The oldest man-made rock garden in Europe is Grade II* listed and used in the construction were carved stones from the Tower of London and Basaltic lava.  A Historical Walk shows plants connected with the people who first introduced or named them.  The Pharmaceutical Garden beds are arranged according to the use of the drugs obtained from the plants, for example Filipendula ulmaria – the plant from which aspirin was derived and introduced in 1899. A garden of World Medicine shows plants used medicinally by indigenous peoples around the world while the Perfumery and Aromatherapy borders contain plants used in the making of perfume and also plants which yield aromatherapy oils such as Pelargonium odoratissimum (Geranium oil) and Aloysia triphylla (Lemon Verbena).  A visually pleasing and decorative vegetable plot, whose rectangular beds are neatly edged with box, includes herbs, soft fruits and edible flowers.

The work of the garden continues today with projects related to taxonomic research, work with medical herbalists, partnerships with other institutions such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Eden Project and a thriving Education Department.

See web page for further information about the World Garden at Lullingstone Castle.

The planting plan is based on three rows with a balance of heights front to back of border incorporating a wide colour range and long flowering time, backed with very large shrubs and perennials, such as Eupatorium giving pink flowers and purplish stems, Silphium with its golden yellow flowers and the towering Coneflower – Rudbeckia maxima. These are all staked in April when still small using hazel cut from the Nymans woods.

Seed sowing begins in February – in the new, fully-automated Cambridge glasshouse- in different sowing weeks according to length of germination time and to stagger the enormous job of pricking out. Sown into pure coir in modular trays – 35 plants to a tray – on a heated misting bench under plastic and covered in fine grade vermiculite. They are moved to an open mist bench on germination.

The taller and more vigorous plants – Helichrysum, Scabious, Marigolds, Antirrhinums, Cleome, Cosmos – are pricked out into pots during March and April. Seedlings are pricked out into peat-free bedding compost with an added controlled release fertilizer and swell gel. To protect against fungus they use ‘Revive’, a bacterial culture which forms an association with the plant roots and boosts the immunity.

By late April/beg. of May pricking out has finished, the planting plan is drawn up and the borders are marked out with sand and marked with labels for the location of each group of plants.

Planting out, in single colour drifts, is done during Chelsea Week in May and takes all of the garden staff plus volunteers just 1 day. The tall plants are individually staked with hazel which is invisible once growth has been put on.

Dead-heading is carried out once a week from late June when the plants begin to flower and the Antirrhinums are watered with ‘Revive’ to stave off rust.

Striking use of plants like purple Perilla laciniata in a large clump contrasts well with Cineraria ‘Cirrus’ and Rudbeckia ‘Toto Gold’. Also striking use of single colour Antirrhinums such as ‘Scarlet Giant’ – hard to source single colours although Chilterns stock them.

The borders are kept going through to the end of October and sometimes into November- frosts permitting – with plants like the Heliotropes lasting particularly well, but some of the others having to be replaced with chrysanthemums to fill the gaps. A ‘green manure’, such as broad beans, is sown directly into the soil and then rotivated in to provide nitrates during the winter – they also protect the soil from erosion. Dahlias tubers are lifted and cleaned off in November then stored in crates with a covering of coir.

On to the Nuttery – probably the best part of the garden right now packed with Trilliums – the white of the grandiflorum flowers gleaming through the dappled shade under the trees and the browny red Trillium sessile with interesting leaf bordering the path. Buy them in leaf, said AD, don’t try to grow them from the rhizomes as they don’t appreciate the drying out.

White wisteria sinensis alba with 2 foot long pannicles tumbling over the wall along the Moat Walk opposite the golden Ghent Azaleas.

I had never really thought about why it is called Sissinghurst CASTLE gardens – in fact there was never a castle here at all – simply a medieval, moated manor house down in the old orchard area (part of the moat remains today), followed by the Tudor manor house, (the front range of buildings now remaining) – with Elizabethan tower. However, Sissinghurst housed more than 3000 French prisoners of war for 7 years from 1756 and it was they who called it ‘le chateau’.

Alexis talked about how Vita and Harold bought the castle ruin and surrounding land for £12,000 in 1930 with the objective of creating a new garden, having decided to leave their former home at Long Barn near Sevenoaks as there was to be development nearby. Harold was responsible for the hard landscaping (although he had no formal training) planning the wonderful long views and vistas. Vita was the plantswoman and between 1947 and 1961 wrote a weekly gardening column for the Observer newspaper which is a wonderful record of what Vita liked and disliked and helps the Head Gardener to decide on what to plant.

The wildflower meadow in the orchard looked stunning with the roses climbing up through the fruit trees (not yet out) – they lost quite a few trees in the ’87 hurricane so have created wooden structures as a replacement for some of the roses to scramble up.

A shock to see that a section of the tall yew hedges which make up the Yew Walk between the tower lawn orchard have been cut down (owing to an attack of the fungal disease, phytophera) and new plants put in (currently about 2 feet high). Of course this completely opens out the view from the Tower Lawn onto the orchard – some may like it, others not. Apparently it will be another 7 years before the new plants reach the same height as the existing yews.

On the tower wall, noticed the beautiful yellow climbing Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ – only 4 yrs old and very fast growing – already up to first floor window.

News that the Priest’s house in the corner of the white garden is currently being converted by the Trust to be one of their holiday cottages and so will be available to rent! White rose Mme Alfred Carriere against house wall, Viburnum opulus roseum, Geraneum cenereum subcaulescens, Chaenomeles ‘Knap Hill Scarlet’, Physostegia virginiana ‘Alba’, Olearea scilloniensis and Pulmonaria officinalis ‘Sissinghurst white’- all caught my eye!