Thanks for downloading this garden cutting from the National Trust. In these shorter programs I'm exploring a particular aspect of our work. I'm Alan Power, the head gardener for the National Trust at Stourhead in Wiltshire. But today I'm at Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent, a garden designed by poet and author Vita Sackville West and diplomat Harold Nicholson. I'm standing next to Josh Sparks in the garden at Sissinghurst.
It's quite chilly, but actually Josh has got a particular passion and interest in the meadows here, don't you?
I certainly do even though some people probably call it an obsession rather than a passion. So-
No, there's a fine line, isn't there.
Yeah, definitely, definitely. But the reason why I'm obsessed or love them so much is because they're so entwined in our culture. They've been with us since Neolithic man, hung up his bow and arrows and spear and decided to keep animals rather than hunt them. So they've been with us for thousands of years.
And in recent years, in the past really 60, 70 years, we've seen a 98% decline in the wildflowers due to fertilizers, the mechanization of farming equipment and almost this need to make a lot of profit from our land. So ponds disappeared with that hedgerows, trees and every scrap of land has been used for the production of food or the over grazing of animals.
So, what are you doing at Sissinghurst at the moment? Because I know you're trying to re-establish some of the meadows here.
When Vita and Harold came here. They, well, the reason why they got Sissin- Or fell in love with Sissinghurst was because of the Kentish countryside. Vita writes about it regularly. And when they came, the farm that was here originally was crashing against the castle walls. And now we're taking it back to the kind of 1930s farm. So we're turning a lot of these homogeneous, boring lawns making
them back into wild flowers. And we're sharing this kind of wildflower experience, wildlife, with our visitors.
And that helps I suppose, tell the whole story of Sissinghurst, you know, its connection with the agricultural landscape, its connection with the surrounding landscape and merges both closer together, doesn't it?
Yeah, definitely. Within the three years that we've created the meadows, the wildlife has shot up almost or is more visible. Now, we try and manage our meadows in the most traditional way we can. So we do scythe we do make hayricks, for example, the oast meadow, which we created two years ago, this kind of blank boring lawn. Now, when you walk down, there's all these Oxeye Daisies and Ragged Robins. But there's all these sparrows kind of spiralling up out the centre of it playing.
And when I come into the orchard where we are now at five in the morning to scythe on the hayrick pile, there's always a Tawny Owl at the top. And then as you work down the hayrick, you get birds taking hay to make nests and the next bit down you get all these flies and moths and butterflies all playing in it. And if you look at the bottom of the hayrick, you just see the bottoms of mice, kind of scuffling in, scuffling out again.
So we are really creating amazing habitats for wildlife through traditional management and through the kind of wildflowers.
I'm gonna have to come and see that Tawny Owl
We'll get you scything! Because I'm a bit of a soppy git, I mean, I see it as a connection to people. You know, Romans brought Scythes over 2000 years ago. So you're doing something that someone 2000 years ago is doing. But you're so in tune and connected to the meadow when you're scything. If you're scything your windrow and you hear some squeaks or noises, you can move the grass and there's a nest of mice and
you can work your way around them and then carry on. It's not like a machine which just kind of sucks and splutters everything up. You really are connected to it and you can really-
And you feel it, don't you? Because you develop a rhythm when you're scything.
Oh, yeah. It's like a dance. Once you get the rhythm you just go through. I mean, I do it barefoot as much as I can because you can feel how much you cut the grass. So, when you're walking through you can see the stubble and stuff. So, it's really fantastic.
Nice one. But you've, you've been doing some research into the plants as well, haven't you? And has that been research abroad.
As a gardener personally, I take most inspiration from seeing plants in the wild.
Yeah,
I think as any gardener to see different combinations, different habitats, how they grow, how they colonize themselves is so important as gardeners and we can apply in all our gardens. So I've done a lot of traveling. So I've been to Slovenia, the Outer Hebrides, Romania, the French Alps, the Mediterranean in search of kind of wildflowers- meadows to see how people manage them and to see the combinations.
And especially in Romania, I live with a farmer and we did scything, we made hayricks and he talked to us about the farming and how he benefited the wildlife and it benefited him and everything I learn, I bring back here.
And Vita and Harold did something very similar, didn't they? They travelled and took inspiration back here as well.
Yeah. So Harold was a diplomat. So he went all across kind of Constantinople and Vita especially went to Iran and she saw a lot of Irises growing out of the desert and took inspiration from that to put Irises in and especially the garden room, Delos, which we're going to start next year. Used to be her Mediterranean garden, which she took inspiration from the Mediterranean and the ancient city of Delos.
You must be learning an awful lot from what you're doing here.
Yeah, I mean, anything I learn I want to share and here at Sissinghurst, The work we're doing is quite innovative. And we actually now run our own meadow internship where people come and stay here for a week, get engrossed in the kind of atmosphere of Sissinghurst. And we scythe and projects later on is a massive field at the back lake field. We're turning it back into a meadow and a cherry orchard and the field out the front, which is this huge
kind of manicured lawn. We're really boning it back, turning it back into meadow, having sheep grazing animals. So when people walk down the car park, they're just going to be connected to this rural idea straight away. And we're going to teach more people about that how to incorporate it into their gardens.
That's brilliant. Josh, thanks a million. Thanks for downloading this garden cutting from the National Trust. If you've enjoyed this podcast, you can find more of them by searching for National Trust Gardens, subscribe on iTunes or follow us on your favorite podcast app. We'd love to know what you think of this series and help us to
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I'm Bettany Hughes. I've been visiting National Trust Properties all my life, but in this series of podcasts, I'm going beyond the delights of tees and topiary to reveal the surprising European roots of some of the most splendid sites in England. You can subscribe to my series by searching for Bettany Hughes's 10 places, Europe and us, on your podcast app.