Sissinghurst Castle Garden...

The last weekend in May was a bank holiday in the UK and I finally took the opportunity to visit Sissinghurst Castle Garden. Sissinghurst is a National Trust garden, and despite moving to Kent a year ago, this was my first visit - shameful really, as it is only 30 minutes away.

The weather has been a bit changeable, but Monday dawned with sunshine and blue skies, so off to Sissinghurst I went...

In the middle of the beautiful Kent countryside, Sissinghurst is famous for being the home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. The couple moved to the estate in the 1930's and set about creating the wonderful garden rooms that you can visit today.

Sissinghurst actually dates from the Saxon period where it started life as a pig farm before being developed into a moated manor house. Throughout the intervening centuries the estate went through a number of iterations, including a renaissance rebuild in the 16th century, and period as a prison camp in the 18th century.

The Oast House - a common sight in this part of Kent

The property was bought in 1932 by Vita Sackville-West (poet/writer) and her husband Arthur Nicolson (diplomat/author). Harold undertook the architectural planing for the series of garden rooms that you can explore today, while the planting schemes were designed by Vita. Most famous for the 'white garden', each room is beautiful, ranging from restful blues and purples to one filled with fiery oranges, reds and yellows.

Vita's designs are still the inspiration behind many garden designers of today - I spoke with one staff member at the site who also said that the white garden is under redevelopment at the moment to bring it back to the planting scheme initially designed by Vita.

While the peonies and many of the roses were only still in bud (I think another visit in a month or two is in order), the gardens were a riot of colours...and the smell was divine.

And there was beauty wherever you looked...

Given my plans to add planting to my own garden for year-round interest, I hope to re-visit Sissinghurst each season for inspiration...

Spring in the garden...

A few weeks ago I posted about the changes I had made to the front garden. Over the past few weeks it has also been heartening to see that the work I did in the back garden throughout last summer and autumn is starting to come to fruition.

After stripping out all of the overgrown shrubs, I was left with some quite bare garden borders and an unwell looking lawn...

September 2014

Over the autumn I planted ten hydrangea bushes which have come into leaf and three standard roses. The grass has also mostly recovered, with a few uneven spots on which I am still working. I'm pleased with the basic structure of the garden, but while there are a few lovely signs of spring (not least the lovely crab apple in the back corner), it has also helped me to plan the work I wish to undertake this year to ensure earlier spring interest (bulbs....lots of bulb planting!). Heidi, of the lovely Adelaide Villa blog, has also suggested that I can help reduce the impact of the expanse of somewhat ugly fencing by painting it a dark charcoal. I am quite keen to do this and have pinned many pictures for inspiration - however, after the 15 hours of painting that was the marathon involved in painting the front picket fence, I think I need to rebuild my motivation and energy before I do so...

Here is how the garden looks as of two weekends ago...

...and I eventually decided to pull out the brightly yellow coloured but very spiky berberis and now have a lovely camellia gracing that space instead...

A gardener's shed...

June 2014

This is my first home with a garden, and hence my first need of a garden shed. Luckily, the property came with a shed at the end of the garden when I bought it...unfortunately, it was a fairly unattractive shade of bright blue...

Last summer when I did most of the major changes to the back garden, I also painted the outside of the shed, so it had less of an obvious presence at the end of the garden...

September 2014

While the outside had improved, the inside was not somewhere I wanted to spend any time. It was dark, dusty and fully of seemingly hundreds of spider webs. I used to go in and out as quickly as possible to retrieve what I needed.

At the beginning of spring, I decided that the time had come to pull everything out and make it a more functional place for storage (and somewhere I was happy to venture). I forgot to take a photo of it in its cluttered and spider-infested glory, but here is how it looked after I pulled everything out, swept it from top to bottom for dust, dirt and spider webs and liberally applied insect spray...

It actually looks a lot brighter in these pictures than it ever felt in actuality. I decided to whitewash the ceiling and walls, add a potting bench, some shelving and a tool rack. It is still just a serviceable garden shed but it is at least now easy to put my hand on what I need (and no longer scary to enter!)...

Just in time for the garden-oriented activities of spring and summer to begin...

First impressions...

Back in the cold and damp days of February, the project to revamp my front garden began. After a good three months, and not to mention the work I did last summer, the front entrance to my home now finally gives the first impression that I had hoped...

When I first started looking for a house, I was hoping for a Victorian or Edwardian home - something that had character. So, when I found this 1901 Victorian semi-detached cottage in my price range I was delighted. However, although the Victorian bones were there, the front entrance was really not to my taste.

As a reminder, here is where I started last June:

The picket fence was weathering at different rates, resulting in mismatched colours, the front garden was very straggly and even the lovely lavender had become very woody, and I was definitely not enamoured with the blue front door and expanse of pebbles in the garden.

In August I completed some essential work to repair the cracked and peeling paint on the window and door architraves - and taking the opportunity to change the colour of the front door. I also pulled out all of the existing shrubs (that had been trampled while I worked on the bay window) and started to plant the structure of the new garden...

August 2014

In August last year I started to get quotes from landscape gardeners to come and relay the path to the front door and side gate, remove the pebbles, build some brick garden edging for the window garden bed and a new garden along the front fence, and finally, lay turf. Having found a lovely, and reasonably priced landscaper, I then had to wait until February of this year to find a slot in his work schedule where he could fit in my work.

So, in mid February, work finally started. Here are the before pics:

From the side path looking towards the front fence

The old and decrepit side path

After a few days, the garden was starting to take shape. All of the pebbles had been removed and both paths had been re-laid with pale grey sandstone. My neighbours also decided to have their front path replaced, so we were able to make this a joint (and consistent) effort.

Paths complete, brick garden edging laid and ground prepared for turf.

February is not the best time to lay turf, so I had to wait another three weeks or so until the worst of the overnight frosts had passed before Leo returned to lay the turf. After much dithering, I also decided to paint the front picket fence - I had received conflicting advice about this, but in the end decided that I really didn't feel that the weathered wood look was what I wanted.

Two weeks ago we had a nice batch of dry weather, including a weekend - so I decided to make the most of it. Thirteen hours of painting later and the worst of it is done (part of the side section still needs another coat...but they are predicting dry weather tomorrow, so I hope to have it finished then).

A last bout of planting in the rain last Sunday, and the front garden is finally complete...now I just need to wait for the new plants to grow and fill out - but that will be a much easier task to watch and enjoy.

The After...

 The bay garden has two standard myrtles, some lavender and aquilegias (to remind me of my grandmother). I've just planted an edging of Japenese Holly - this is gaining increasing popularity here in the UK as it is very similar to box, but not subject to box blight which seems increasingly prevalent. 

The fence garden has a standard white lilac in the centre of the bed, flanked by choiysa ternata - these will grow into hedges that I'll keep clipped to around fence height.

The much improved side path

It took a long time to reach this point, but it is now a real pleasure to come home and see the difference...

Getting there in the garden...

I finally feel like I've been making some progress in the garden. For the first three months after I moved in, my only efforts in the garden seemed more akin to destruction than beautifying.

You see, this is what the garden was like the day I moved in...

Lush, green, but not quite what I had envisaged - the bright blue garden shed and large deciduous shrubs were not part of the plan.

Instead, my pinterest garden board is generally full of pleached trees, and single colour borders...

Image via

Image via

So, I resorted to three months of digging out every misplaced and overgrown shrub in the garden - I finally bought a mattock...if only I'd done this three months earlier this task would have been an awful lot easier than digging them out with a spade.

Here is where the redevelopment of the garden has reached to date - I've just started to re-plant the beginning of a structure to the new garden scheme...

Ideally, I would have loved to do a row of pleached limes along the fence - unfortunately, it is such an ugly expanse of fencing, that I really needed to plant something that was evergreen...which narrowed the options considerably. I eventually settled on evergreen magnolias. 

They will be underplanted with predominantly hydrangeas and hebes. I did find a type of gardenia at the garden centre a few weeks ago. I didn't think they survived the UK winters but these are a supposedly hardy type - time will tell in the coming months.There are small hebes along the front of each of the two long beds - these are a small version which only grows to about 60cm. They are called 'Champagne' but are actually white flowers with the slightest hint of lavender. The upturned plant pots are serving as spacers for the planned hydrangeas - I've not been able to order them in time this year, so these will now need to wait until next spring to be ordered and planted.

I've installed a steel-edge garden edging to give a cleaner demarcation between lawn and garden beds. Unfortunately my lawn looks pretty dire at present - I had a major problem with perennial weeds that is still not yet resolved. I've laid turf in the new areas that were reclaimed from the large shrubs and seeded the dead areas with lawn seed. I'm hoping these will start to germinate before winter sets in. The small strip of grass that used to run along side the deck was actually a trough and full of weeds, so I decided to replace that small section with gravel.

Finally, I've dug a new garden bed just before the decking (in front of the shed). This is going to become home to some David Austin standard roses. I'm about to order them, ready for bareroot delivery in November. I am fairly certain that I'll be planting a variety called Winchester Cathedral. The soil is quite heavy clay...but the website assures me that roses do very well in clay!

It is a long way from what I have in my mind, but at least I feel like I'm building towards something now...and I think most of the heavy work is complete. Once the roses are planted that is really as much as I can do for this season - apart from planning and scheming what else to add next year come the spring.

In the very far corner, I've planted a small crab-apple tree...

...and I'm already looking forward to the spring blossoms.

In other news, my feline friend has been a frequent visitor...

As you can see, she makes herself quite at home...

...and now her brothers have also invited themselves in...meet Chester and Teddy!