Roses, roses everywhere: how the gardeners at Sissinghurst keep the famous garden on point all summer long

Ensuring Sissinghurst’s famous roses look fabulous throughout the season is one of the many tasks keeping head gardener Troy Scott Smith and his team busy right now. Photographs John Campbell

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Published: Thursday, 13 June 2024 at 10:14 AM

The vernal equinox may be the signal for the garden to wake up, but the slow burn of April and May is only fully ignited with the blaze of June. Soaring spikes of lupins begin to show colour, peony buds rupture revealing their crinkled petals, cow parsley froths in broad waist-high swathes and poppies dance in excited fecundity. For three weeks in June, the air within the crumbling walls of Sissinghurst hangs heavy with the intoxicating scent of roses.

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Of all Sissinghurst’s flowers, it was the rose that most captured Vita Sackville-West’s imagination. ‘They have a generosity which is as desirable in plants as in people,’ she wrote. They’re central to the Sissinghurst style of planting and typical of its soft abundance.

In the famous Rose Garden at Sissinghurst Castle Garden, musk roses, including Rosa ‘Felicia’ and R. ‘Vanity’ are partnered with a range of flowering perennials and bulbs, including Valeriana officinalis, the tall blue spires of Anchusa azurea, Lupinus ‘The Chatelaine’, Digitalis purpurea and Tragopogon porrifolius. Bulbs, including Allium aflatunense, inject colour. © John Campbell

Perhaps surprisingly, there is nothing grand at Sissinghurst; instead a relaxed atmosphere hugs the garden like a familiar overcoat. The garden is subtle yet striking, muscular yet free-flowing, spontaneous yet tight. The garden exhibits an unerring sense of proportion and detail but takes nothing away from its surroundings. The planting is uncluttered by an awareness of fashion or competition and rarities sit cheek by jowl with native wildlings.

The walled Rose Garden, in what was originally Vita and Harold’s vegetable garden
The walled Rose Garden, in what was originally Vita and Harold’s vegetable garden, is filled with not just roses but layers of perennial planting. Its north-south path is studded along its length with a mix of roses, including Rosa ‘Baron Girod de l’Ain’, Rosa ‘James Mitchell’ and Rosa ‘Gloire de France’, along with exotics and stalwarts, such as Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’ and Clematis ‘Mrs Cholmondeley’. © John Campbell

These are the touchstones we work to, the frame within which I manage the garden today. People speculate that I must be constrained in what I would like to do here or that the idea of ‘ancestor worship’ gardening is taken too far at Sissinghurst. I don’t agree – I find the embedded history of the site and the gardening philosophies of Vita and Harold a tool for creativity and ingenuity. My team and I are not method acting; our gardening is not about creating a pastiche or ossified facsimile of Vita and Harold’s garden. Change and renewal are vital ingredients of a thriving, dynamic garden, it is the nature of change that matters, not change in itself.

Iris ‘Black Taffeta’ threaded through with campanula and the biennial sweet rocket, Hesperis matronalis, behind.
Iris ‘Black Taffeta’ threaded through with campanula and the biennial sweet rocket, Hesperis matronalis, behind. © John Campbell

Vita’s planting style at Sissinghurst was instinctive and influenced by the plants she saw on her travels. These plants made an abiding impression and would constantly recur in her gardens and in her writing. Slabs of blue gentians in the Orchard, broad rugs of bearded iris in the Rose Garden, tall shuffling spires of eremurus in the White Garden, and in the Lower Courtyard, overhung by an enormous magnolia, one of the most imposing of June-flowering plants: Cardiocrinum giganteum. Emerging from glossy green leaves somewhat reminiscent of a hosta or veratrum, a stout stem rises up to three or more metres, from the top of which hang many long, narrow, trumpet-shaped, scented flowers of greenish white, maroon-red in the throat.

Another US hybrid from the 1940s, and one of Troy’s all-time favourites, is Iris ‘Shannopin’. Its exuberance is tempered by gently embedding it among simple natives, such as blue cornflower, ox-eye daisies and foxgloves.
Another US hybrid from the 1940s, and one of Troy’s all-time favourites, is Iris ‘Shannopin’. Its exuberance is tempered by gently embedding it among simple natives, such as blue cornflower, ox-eye daisies and foxgloves. © John Campbell

It was Vita’s use of colour that set her above her contemporaries. Her style was based on flower colour and relies on orchestrating subtle combinations and contrasts within an often narrow tonal band. In the Sunset Garden you can feel your pulse racing as the planting throbs in a tidal wave of deeply saturated colour. Reds, oranges and bright yellows collide with incredible intensity. The amazing vermillion-coloured flowers of Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ in tandem with Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ drip their glowing petals to the floor, like molten lava.

Made in the early 1950s, the White Garden represents the plantsmanship of Vita at its most highly developed. In early summer the creamy-white, fragrant flowers of Rosa ‘Madame Legras de Saint Germain’ sit cheek by jowl with Paeonia lactiflora ‘Duchesse de Nemours’. The grey foliage of Stachys byzantina offers a change of tone and the curious flowers of the annual white bladder campion, Silene vulgaris, bring a feeling of the wild.
Made in the early 1950s, the White Garden represents the plantsmanship of Vita at its most highly developed. In early summer the creamy-white, fragrant flowers of Rosa ‘Madame Legras de Saint Germain’ sit cheek by jowl with Paeonia lactiflora ‘Duchesse de Nemours’. The grey foliage of Stachys byzantina offers a change of tone and the curious flowers of the annual white bladder campion, Silene vulgaris, bring a feeling of the wild. © John Campbell

Although not unique, Vita’s White Garden was rare at the time, and became one of the most celebrated and influential gardens of the 20th century

However, it is to the White Garden we turn to witness Vita’s most symphonic and memorable use of colour; an essay in the use of flowers and foliage within the limited palette of grey, green and white. Repeated mounds of lavender bubble like boiling water in a pan and the annual Ammi majus hangs over the garden like sheets of faded muslin. In June, it is Crambe cordifolia with its cage of white flowers that soar overhead, frothing like a billowing cumulus cloud, that steals the show.

Form is everything when working in single colours, particularly white. Here Orlaya grandiflora swirls around Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’ with a single white foxglove adding a powerful vertical energy.
Form is everything when working in single colours, particularly white. Here Orlaya grandiflora swirls around Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’ with a single white foxglove adding a powerful vertical energy. © John Campbell

Although not unique, it was rare at the time, and became one of the most celebrated and influential gardens of the 20th century. Describing the garden, Vita wrote: ‘The white-and-grey garden begins to look well in June, when the little avenue of Almond trees down the centre is draped with the lacy white festoons of Rosa filipes and the genuine old ‘Garland’ Rose, and when generous plantings of Lilium regale come up through the grey Artemisia and silvery Cineraria maritima.’

In the long grass of the Orchard, a touch of romance is imparted by wild-looking roses, such as Rosa roxburghii, the chestnut rose, which has large single pale-pink flowers, followed by spiny yellow-green hips.
In the long grass of the Orchard, a touch of romance is imparted by wild-looking roses, such as Rosa roxburghii, the chestnut rose, which has large single pale-pink flowers, followed by spiny yellow-green hips. © John Campbell

Although it is only June, my attention will soon shift to next year. Together my team and I analyse the planting throughout the year in each of the ten Sissinghurst ‘rooms’, making comments on what’s looking good, what to add, what should be changed, tweaked or removed completely. It is only with these notes that we can plan for autumn changes and improvements for the following year.

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