Sissinghurst Castle Garden

Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson bought a derelict farm in 1930 with the remains of an Elizabethan house on it, including a tall brick tower, and made a garden over the following thirty years in which he laid out the structure and she planted it. The design is a sequence of enclosed rooms divided by walls and hedges, each with its own colour and season, so the garden is discovered rather than surveyed: the White Garden, planted only in white, grey and green, is the best known and has been copied worldwide. Vita wrote a gardening column in the Observer for fourteen years from her tower study, which is kept as it was. Both were writers with complicated private lives, and the National Trust presents that history openly rather than around it.

What you actually see

• The White Garden - a room planted only in white, silver and green.
• The Elizabethan tower - Vita's study kept as she left it, climbable.
• The garden rooms - enclosures each with its own colour and season.
• The moat and orchard - the older farm layout the garden was built into.

When to go

May to July for the garden at its peak, with the White Garden best in June; the roses and the purple border follow. The garden opens roughly March to October with limited winter access to the grounds.

Honest expectations

The garden is small and the paths are narrow, so it manages visitor numbers with timed entry that must be booked in peak season. Rooms become single-file queues in June. The tower stair is a tight spiral.

Nearby

Bodiam Castle lies south; Cranbrook and the Weald villages surround it.