To coincide with our exhibition Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, we visited Sissinghurst Castle in Kent to meet head gardener Troy Scott-Smith and see how Vita Sackville-West’s legacy is kept alive through the gardens.
Influenced by travels across Persia and making her first large scale garden at Long Barn in Kent, Sissinghurst’s gardens became Vita Sackville-West’s sanctuary and the focus for collaboration with her husband, the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson. In his words, the gardens were ‘an escape from the world’, and they provided the stimulus for much of Sackville-West’s poetry and her garden writing.
Film by Storya.