Outdoor Rooms

There is such a thing as modernist gardening, and in England Christopher Tunnard was its principal proponent. But interwar great gardens were mostly baroque in inspiration and design, expressing baroque principles of excess and astonishment. Philip Sassoon’s garden at Port Lympne is one of the campest. The design is by Philip Tilden, who also worked on Garsington Manor, another Italianate garden. Baroque gardening in England owes much to Sir George Sitwell’s carefully researched book on the topic, to Geoffrey Jellicoe and John Shepherd’s Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, and to Cecil Pinsent, designer of the gardens at I Tatti, who influenced both Lawrence Johnson (Hidcote) and Vita Sackville-West (Sissinghurst).