Vita Sackville West and her Garden at Sissinghurst

Join Rosemary Irving for an illustrated talk examining the extraordinary life of Vita Sackville West and her famous garden at Sissinghurst in Kent. Novelist, poet, journalist, and immortalised as the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Sackville-West combined literary accomplishment with a bold reimagining of garden design.

In partnership with her husband Harold Nicolson, she transformed the ruins of Sissinghurst Castle into a sequence of garden ‘rooms’ that redefined modern horticulture, later chronicled in her influential Observer column, In Your Garden. Today, her achievements endure both on the page and in the landscape, with Sissinghurst among the National Trust’s most cherished sites.