Jean, my wife is the HEAD gardener at chez nous. I am
a mere assistant. When the head gardener announced that she would like to
visit a couple of special gardens in the south east of England, I enlisted
the help of two good friends of ours to select and book some suitable
accommodation for a weekend in mid May. The weather should be quite good,
May is often our best month in the UK for sunshine. Not May 2004. Not that
we let a little rain, thunder and solid cloud cover spoil our outing.
Hello Mike
I enjoyed the pics. They brought back
many happy memories of the time I was stationed at RAF Rye in the early
1950's. Whilst there I had a girl friend who came from Winchelsea so I
spent some time there as well.
Happy days!
Roy Pugh
(NEATH)
Sissinghurst Castle and Farm have had a chequered
history. The farm was a poorhouse, then abandoned in 1855 and was scarcely
habitable for many years. In 1928, the estate was put up for sale. two years
on in 1930 Vita Sackville-West came and fell in love with the place. Within
three weeks she had bought it together with 400 acres of farmland.
The entrance and the long front range is the largest and
oldest part of the surviving building going back to 1490. Queen Elizabeth
Ist visited in 1573 to be greeted by Sir Richard Baker. No relation, sadly.
Inside the farmyard an ancient electric motor which used
to blow air into the base of an oast house.
Nearby, I saw a pile of logs in an outbuilding which was
clearly ear marked for someone!
The twin towers are visible from all points of the
gardens.
Vita was a romantic and used to sit in the
room under the flag to read and write books. She wrote some twenty books in
this room, usually unheated and with the company of one of her Alsatian
dogs.
The gardens are spectacularly English. I
remember as a child, looking through a copy of 'Newnes Golden Encyclopedia'.
In it I saw gardens such as are seen in the
following photographs
During lunch, the heavens opened and down
came the rain. Fortunately, we had managed to walk around most of the
gardens before the deluge started.
