The White Garden is part of Sissinghurst, an Elizabethan house and garden, in Kent. It is the crowning achievement of Vita Sackville-West – writer, diarist, gardener.
I was struck by these beautiful photographs of this famous garden using old film, shot at dusk, when it was designed to be seen: ‘when walking home to bed after dinner, when the whites glow in the dark, floating free.’ The moonlight perfectly captures its full romanticism.
It was created in the 1930’s as a refuge; ‘as a secret set away from the rest of the world.’ It is a poet’s garden – planned by Harold Nicolson and planted by his wife Vita, where the ruling philosophy was an abundant fullness.
And despite many foreign plants, quintessentially English.
The house itself dates back to the 1560’s, and was once a Royal palace for Elizabeth and her court. But the purpose of Vita’s garden was ‘to stand outside time and history.’
In this spirit, I include here a trailer to Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘Orlando’. The book was written as a tribute to Vita. Spanning 400 years of English history it immortalises her as the hero ‘Orlando’, a testament to Woolf’s love for her exceptional friend and sometime lover.
