The Reviewer

Sissinghurst: The Dream Garden

by Tim Richardson Frances Lincoln, £30

For all its accomplishment, there remained one aspect of Sissinghurst that was unsettled. Delos, the classical garden Harold and Vita attempted to model on the landscape of the Greek island was, in author Tim Richardson’s terms, “a disaster”. The Wealden clay, the aspect, the climate: all were unsuitable. Much of the garden was removed in 1969 and it lay, as Richardson puts it, in “suspended animation” until 2019 when it fell to designer Dan Pearson to take it on as a restoration project.

With this missing piece of the puzzle now in place, a