Gardens lost and found

Two world wars had wreaked unprecedented havoc on landscapes wild and cultivated, a violence well referenced in the writings of the trench poets and those who suffered less directly back home. Hope, however, springs eternal and in the same year Connolly closed his gardens Vita Sackville-West began work on hers.

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A view of Sissinghurst Castle in 1760 from a drawing by an officer. K.Top, xviii. 52.2.a. Copyright © The British Library Board		‘The Nightingale’, pen, ink and wash drawing dated 1933 by Arthur George Watts. MS Deposit 10212. Copyright © The British Library Board

The recreation of Sissinghurst was a joyous, restorative and quite explicit response to the broken world depicted in Eliot's The Waste Land. Yet in many respects the latter half of the 20th century belongs to the ordinary garden, a spot whose neat lawns stand in the popular imagination for domesticity, duty and enjoyment.