Garden ‘rooms’ have an undeniably grand, and dare I say it, slightly archaic feel about them – the preserve of historic estates where there’s so much garden to garden that it warrants being divvied up into a series of smaller gardens or ‘rooms’. Often this is done with formal hedging, tightly clipped in the manner of eras past where households had armies of gardeners on staff and No Mow May wasn’t a thing. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the former house and garden of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. Here, highly ordered geometry carves order out of what would have been (as the ‘before’ photos attest) vast swathes of unstructured garden. The rectilinear architecture of evergreen hedging, often over two metres high, creates a decidedly neat series of enclosures, walkways and vistas which is revealed in immaculate precision when you stand at the top of the famous tower and get a bird’s eye view of Harold Nicolson’s vision writ large. It could feel a bit oppressive, the hand of the designer so keenly felt, so out of step with our modern-day appreciation of the uncontrived. And yet it doesn’t. It feels so full of joy and personality, so personal and rich – how so?
Well for one, because Vita Sackville-West was a big believer in abundance (‘cram, cram, every chink and cranny’) but also a theme: ‘always exaggerate rather than stint’. These ideas make for an explosive combination. Each garden room is themed by colour: there is the famed ethereal romance of the white garden, the riotous heat of the cottage garden, or a cascade of blues and purples in the purple borders. In each, beds are full to bursting with plants that sing to that tune – in bloom, stem and foliage. The effect is that each becomes a deliciously intense version of itself; a chromatic Platonic ideal expressed in plants. Adding to the intensity are the relative confines of the evergreen walls that frame and contain the exuberance, offering stoic structure and calm contrast.
Whole rooms dedicated to a single colour palette and miles of established high-maintenance hedging might sounds extravagant and irrelevant to those of us living with slightly more modest gardens but there’s a lot to take home. Dividing your garden into rooms, or if easier to imagine, zones, is one of the basic tenets of garden design. Creating distinct areas for different activities – eating, morning coffee, play – gives the space structure and creates opportunities for reveals and journeys as you move from one to the next. It is tempting to want to keep gardens as one big expanse, for fear of making them feel small by dividing things up. But actually, the opposite is often true. By zoning your garden you’re not only creating clear workable spaces, but also a bit of mystery about what lies beyond – and in doing so, you’re making it feel bigger.
How you create these zones is up to you, and it doesn’t need to be six-foot-high hedges. Sometimes, a simple planting bed bisecting the garden is enough to break up the space and signal a different zone. A low wall or gabion wall could do the same, a generous bed of grasses creating a gauzy layer between one room and the next, or a simple trellis with climbers. In fact, vertical planting is a key ingredient in the magic of Sissinghurst – the walls of the rooms make you feel totally immersed in the planting, which adds to the feeling of romance and abundance.
The other big takeaway from Sissinghurst’s glorious garden rooms is the value of a theme – choose one and stick to it. This is especially true of small gardens where you don’t have room for the eye to be distracted with lots of different colours and ideas. If your garden is on the small side, think of it as a single garden room and be singular with your vision: choose a concise colour palette and run with it. The deeper into the theme you go, the more intense the effect. This doesn’t necessarily just mean a single colour; it could even be two complementary colours – burgundy and lime, say, or yellow and blue. But whatever it is, be ruthless in not allowing plants that deviate from this palette. The complexity comes in form and texture. If your colour palette is blue and white, think about a variety of flower and leaf shape that dance to this tune – soft glaucous grey leaves, spiky silvery foliage or blousy pale petals – and however much you might fall for a beautiful coral peony, you must try not to succumb.
The other great advantage of divvying up your garden into discrete rooms is that you can really think about seasons; rather than trying to achieve the holy grail of year-round interest, each one could excel in a different season. Perhaps you would have the spring garden, chock full of bulbs and early flowering shrubs like Daphnes and Viburnums, nearest the house. The rooms where you’re likely to spend most time in high summer – the outdoor dining area perhaps or the pool, is where you concentrate on dynamic summer planting. If you have the space, designing like this affords more fun and flexibility in choosing plants because you’re not shackled to the good do-ers with long flowering seasons.
It is a style of gardening that feels out of touch with the naturalistic aesthetic that dominates planting design today, and the effect will of course feel much more designed. But there is nothing to say that it can’t also be exuberant, original and full of life – much like Vita herself.
