Along the stairwell that spirals up the Elizabethan tower at Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West – when she made the garden there in the 1930s and 40s – once assembled a collection of glass plates, jugs, bottles and bowls in the window openings. Ascending to her writing room, or on up to the rooftop beyond, every day she’d walk past their brilliant colours: one window all blue, much of it Bristol glass, some of it Persian; another a mixture of ochres, ambers, oranges and reds, with one deep-purple scent bottle set in the middle.
As you climb these steps, each opening becomes a kaleidoscope, with your own changing angle
shifting the way the objects are animated by the sunlight that glances and reflects off their surfaces; hues overlap and fuse as a bottle or plate emerges from behind another. The window becomes a kind of colour theatre, lit in an ever-changing series of chromatic configurations.
That warm-coloured arrangement, evoking the glowing tones of a fire dying down, is my favourite. No-one is quite sure where this glass collection comes from. Some pieces are Chinese, others probably Moroccan or Italian: all places that Vita and Harold Nicolson loved and visited often. It is quite garden-ish as a palette, and indeed these are the shades Vita chose for the cottage garden outside her own bedroom at Sissinghurst: not quite flame-coloured but deeper and richer than that; a kind of mellowed mixture, like fruit that has been stewed and stirred.
Both garden and window are hymns to saturation, each a no-holds-barred indulgence in colour, density and richness. That lack of compromise or anything wishy-washy is the hallmark of Vita’s genius. You see it in her writing room, in her clothes, in the tapestries and paintings she hung on every wall, in the thickened atmosphere through which she moved: nothing is dilute. It’s almost like everything she did served to express a love of the concentrated – the intense and distilled. She would always wear silk and velvet, not cotton; pearls or emeralds, not silver or gold. If something was worth doing, it was always worth doing wholly and completely.
Her mother had a wonderful window of Chinese amber at Knole (WoI March 2006) – recreated by Vita at Sissinghurst in what the family called the Big Room – which was arranged so that the morning sun would shine through it, casting coloured shadows across the shelves the pieces stood on and, from there, across the floorboards below, so that the room was spread with colour as though with an extraordinary leopard skin made up of amber and coral light.
The glass-filled windows in the tower are clearly descendants of that late Victorian and Edwardian taste for an enriched interior. They are fundamentally so simple, but never less than alluring as you pass; so much so that, when I lived at Sissinghurst (WoI Sept 2008), I always felt compelled to stop beside them when climbing those stairs, to drink in what each one had to offer.
They are a model for any gardener. If you want to make a patch magnetically beautiful, choose families of colours like these. I’m not suggesting a one-colour garden, but rather one where the tones converse and enhance one another – your selected shades not a million miles away from each other, but certainly not on the same side of the palette. This is a recipe I try to follow in every bit of planting I do: put a purple scent-bottle interloper in among the warm reds, ambers and umbers filling the rest of the space.
Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, Biddenden Rd, Cranbrook, Kent TN17 2AB. For opening times, ring 01580 710700, or visit nationaltrust.org.uk
A version of this article also appears in the July 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
