As the garden’s hot borders reach their seasonal peak, head gardener Troy Scott Smith shows how he and his team keep the interest going through summer and manage important tasks. Photographs John Campbell
High to late summer is a time of transition at Sissinghurst. The intensity of the planting in spring and early summer is replaced with a languid, delightfully slow-moving feeling.
Beds and borders reach their peak in high summer and are held, helped here and there by a gardener’s hand. Or perhaps we will pop in a flowering plant to give an injection of colour. From July through to September, the planting is at its most exuberant, the light at its most intense and the colours at their most saturated. As we move towards the end of the season, our thoughts and actions are firmly focused on the future, learning and improving on this year for the next. But at Sissinghurst the past is never forgotten.
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High summer in the Orchard sees us returning to an age-old craft to cut our hay. Scything in the summer sun, hayricks drying, it’s hard not to feel the strong ties to the garden of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Scything is a task that is in tune with the seasons and of the land. It’s a pastoral, simpler, slower way of gardening and living, and one memorably described by Vita in her poem, The Garden:
‘What pleasant sounds: the scythe in the wet grass/ Where ground’s too rough for the machine to pass,/ Grass should be wet for a close cut, the blade/ Hissing like geese as swathe by swathe is laid;/ The pigeons on the roof, the hives as warm;/ July is the month of sounds. They melt and merge/ Softer than shallow waves in pebbled surge/ Forward and backward in a summer cove;/ The very music of the month is warm,/ The very music sings the song of love.’
The Cottage Garden, also known as the Sunset Garden, was a favourite with both Vita and Harold – the innermost of what Harold called Sissinghurst’s ‘succession of privacies’. It is an intimate, enclosed space and although visually connected to the rest of Sissinghurst, it feels secluded and private.
Foliage underpins any planting; it acts as a wonderful prelude to the floral element, providing a base note to the entire scheme, but for Vita and for me it is the subtle use of colour that sets the planting in this part of the garden apart.
Vita carefully restricted her planting to variations of orange, red and yellow. In spring the plants are low, but they generously fill the beds so that everywhere fat cushions of flower and foliage sprawl and spill over paths, lending a romantic luxuriance. Heaps of yellow Helianthemum ‘Wisley Primrose’, scarlet Geum ‘Blazing Sunset’ and bright-orange Trollius chinensis ‘Golden Queen’ are punctuated with broad swathes of the dark, dusky wallflowers Erysimum ‘Blood Red’ and Erysimum ‘Fire King’, and just enough foliage from bearded irises and the daylily Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus. The sultry wine-coloured flowers of Rosa ‘Dusky Maiden’ are in turn echoed by the purple-coloured leaves of Canna ‘Wyoming’. Liberal dollops of the native field poppy, Papaver rhoeas, knit the whole thing together.
In summer you can feel your pulse racing as the garden throbs in a tidal wave of colour, none more spectacular than the amazing vermilion-coloured flowers of Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ in tandem with Dahlia ‘Brandaris’. Dahlias were a favourite of Harold’s and the Cottage Garden features Dahlias ‘Yellow Hammer’, bright-orange Dahlias ‘East Court’, gentle-orange Dahlias ‘Autumn Lustre’, red Dahlias coccinea and lemon-yellow Dahlias ‘Glorie van Heemstede’.
Tender shrubby salvias such as S. fulgens are also an important element, together with clusters of flatheads of achilleas. The accents are provided by red hot pokers, which Vita liked and Harold hated; the incredibly tall and striking Iris spuria, standing nearly 2m tall; and substantial plantings of Verbascum bombyciferum ‘Polarsommer’ and our own Cottage Garden hybrid, raised annually from seed collected by the gardeners. Knitting this Rousseauesque planting together is the light and airy Patrinia scabiosifolia. The chrome-yellow coloured flowers punctuate the air like a swarm of hovering flies.
Recently we have introduced the fantastic Moraea huttonii to the planting scheme. A relative of the iris family from the high mountains of South Africa, it has tall, wiry stems up to 1.2m high, which hold numerous sweetly scented yellow flowers with curious brown markings. Huge drifts hang over the lower-storey planting like sheets of faded muslin, alongside bronze fennel, Foeniculum vulgare ‘Purpureum’.
USEFUL INFORMATION
Address Sissinghurst Castle, Biddenden Road, nr Cranbrook, Kent TN17 2AB. Tel 01580 710700. Web nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst Open Gardens open daily 11am-5.30pm. Admission £17. Follow Troy on Instagram @troyscottsmith1