Estate Living Magazine Alfresco Living - Issue 36 December 2018 | Page 54

Inside out
‘Curiosity keeps me alive,’ wrote Roberto Burle Marx, the Brazilian landscaper
whose modernist aesthetic transformed landscaping around the world, and who was renowned
for extending the architecture of his clients’ buildings into his gardens. And it’s curiosity that
keeps most gardens alive, too – for without it, without something about the outdoor space that
triggers your ‘I-wonder-what’s-around-that-corner’ response, your garden could be in danger of
becoming just another flat, featureless, even (horrible thought) plain boring old place.
Enter the ‘garden room’.
The idea of defining different areas of the garden as rooms comes from
the design of the celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, which were
developed by Vita Sackville-West (poet, novelist, journalist, columnist –
her column for The Observer ran from 1946 to 1961 – and paramour of the
writer Virginia Woolf).
Vita and her husband, the diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson, acquired the castle
in 1930. After some years of clearing the overgrown grounds, Sir Harold
laid out the formal architecture of the gardens as clearly defined rooms –
some of which were enclosed with materials like hedges or pink brick walls.
Into this geometry, Vita planted a ‘romantic profusion’ (in the words of the
historian Anne Scott-James) of single colours in some areas, and riots of
multihued blooms in others – an innovative style that became her signature.
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