Sissinghurst

The garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent is, in many ways a literary garden because it draws visitors interested in Vita Sackville-West. She created the garden in the 1930's with her husband, Harold Nicolson. The National Trust took it over in 1967 - the website is here. The metaphor of a garden is irresistible, after all, to anyone with an interest in religion, mythology and sexuality - at Sissinghurst there is a famous "White Garden" and Vita's beloved rose garden.

There is also an Orlando trans angle to Sissinghurst. Although Virginia Woolf based her character of Orlando: A Biography on Vita Sackville-West, other commentators have noted that a rather Orlando-like character named Dawn Langley Pepita Simmons grew up at Sissinghurst, where her parents were servants. Born as Gordon Langley Hall in 1922, Simmons lived her first decades as a boy. In her twenties she emigrated to Canada and later the U.S., becoming a successful biographer. In the 1960's, she moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and claimed to be intersex (disputed by others), before undergoing sex reassignment surgery. It seems unlikely that Woolf (or even Sackville-West) would have known the details of Simmons' gender issues back then, but gender fluidity was a subject of interest within their social circle, so who knows?

Other literary English gardens or lovely old homes mentioned in this website include Burnt Norton (T.S. Eliot) and Vauxhall Gardens (Casanova). Below is Great Maytham Hall Garden, also in Kent, which is said to have inspired The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett.