Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole, the great ancestral house in Kent that had belonged to her family for generations – and which, because she was a woman, she would never be allowed to inherit. It was a loss she carried quietly for the rest of her life. When she and her husband Harold Nicolson first saw the derelict ruins of Sissinghurst on a rainy April day in 1930, she described falling in love at first sight: “It was Sleeping Beauty’s Garden, but a garden crying out for rescue.” Sissinghurst had once belonged to a Sackville ancestor, in a sense, she was coming home.

What she and Harold built there over the following decades became her defining achievement. Harold, a diplomat with a love of classical structure, designed the formal framework of paths, hedges, and walls. Vita filled it with an exuberant, romantic, painterly generosity of planting that gave the structure its soul. The result was a new idea in British gardening: the “garden room”, a series of distinct enclosed spaces, each with its own mood, palette, and character. As your explore Sissinghurst, you encounter surprise and discovery at every turn, the idea has shaped garden design ever since.