The gardening team at Sissinghurst is embarking on the final phase in the development of the Delos garden.
This has not been a success so far, but perhaps some day it will come right
Vita Sackville-West, the poet and writer, began transforming Sissinghurst Castle Garden in the 1930s with her diplomat and author husband Harold Nicolson.
Delos is one of ten garden rooms at Sissinghurst. It had originally been built in response to a visit that Harold and Vita had made in 1935 to the ruins of the Greek island of this name in the Cyclades. The island provided such a source of inspiration that on their return they aimed to emulate the feel of the "Delos of Sissinghurst", as Vita referred to it once.
Vita and Harold faced many challenges as amateur gardeners including the Kent climate and the north-facing position of the garden. It was a place that had come to be more suited to the site and was now part woodland, part lawn with rose beds lining the boundary. The very name felt like an anomaly.
Despite their best efforts, the garden in their minds never quite materialised. The concept of 'Delos' began to fade away during World War II when it could not be regularly maintained.
In 2014, Head Gardener Troy Scott Smith invited Dan Pearson to act as Garden Advisor to Sissinghurst. The role involved an annual walk round the gardens with Troy, acting as a sounding board for his plans to relax the garden and to steer it gently towards its original vision. Four years later in 2018, Troy invited Dan and his studio to work with him and his team to re-imagine the garden.
The design recalled the kind of stepped terracing and emerging bedrock that Vita and Harold first built on the site in the 1930s, "smothered there by mats of the wild flowers of Greece" as Vita wrote of the original intention.
Building work started in 2019 with improved drainage, the heavy Wealden clay that scuppered Vita and Harold’s mediterranean planting was replaced with a gritty and nutrient poor topsoil.
The garden’s shady north-facing aspect was overcome with the reduction of shade-casting trees, and the newly constructed raised terracing was built leaning south to capture the greatest available light.
Around six thousand plants arrived at Sissinghurst to be planted the following spring, a remarkable collection of plants native to the mediterranean basin, some familiar but many unique in the UK. The garden reopened to the public in 2021.
Five years on, the garden has flourished and we’re beginning a final phase of development in the Delos garden with Dan Pearson Studio.
In place of the 1980s built garage adjoining the Priests House will be a ravine-like portal, canopied in Mediterranean oaks, leading visitors through to the Little North Garden for the first time.
As well as a new pathway creating better flow between garden rooms, access will be improved too. Under the newly planted oaks, dry and shade tolerant underplanting from the mediterranean will reveal the possibilities, beauty and resilience of these species in our changing climate. This development will also support increased biodiversity in the garden, creating even greater variation of habitat for more specialised invertebrates.
Work began in October 2024 with the removal of the garage, which will be followed by the construction of stonework and finally the new garden area will be planted in Spring 2025.
To complete this important work some loud machinery will be used throughout this period. The very northern pathway of the garden will also be closed to allow safe working distance.
In a 1942 article for Country Life, Vita wrote about the inspirations behind the garden, commenting "the plan was inspired by the island of Delos, where the ruins of the houses have left precisely this kind of little terrace, smothered there by mats of the wild flowers of Greece"
1935
On a cruise of the mediterranean, Vita and Harold dock on the ruined island of Delos. So deeply affected by the wash of wildflowers they find there that upon their return to Sissinghurst they decide to create a Greek garden in homage.
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