Making a garden is often most satisfying for the taking of time to do it. In the case of Delos at Sissinghurst, this tenth garden enclosure was started by Vita and Harold after they had visited the Greek island in 1935. They had imagined capturing the mood of the place, its history and tumble of buildings and a civilization lost. What must have been most radical at that time was their desire to bring to an English garden the freedom of the wild phrygana that had for centuries made the ruins its habitat. A tangle of scented thymes, cistus and lavenders and the flush of spring annuals that lights a Greek hillside after winter. 

Their north-facing slope and heavy Kentish clay, coupled with the onset of the war, led Vita to write ten years later that the garden had not been a success and that one day they hoped it might come right. So, almost eighty years later, when Head Gardener Troy-Scott-Smith asked for my help to redesign the garden, it was a baton I was happy to seize. We imagined that Vita and Harold had lived another gardening lifetime, pored over their photographs and rather scanty written records and took the leap to reimagine the garden. To right the challenges that had overturned their dream in the 1930’s, but to do it with the guidance of their vision as the wayfinder.