The Kentish farmhouse where Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson live
Long Barn is the Kentish farmhouse where Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson lived from 1915 to 1930, before they moved to Sissinghurst. It was here that the distinctive garden language they would perfect at Sissinghurst was first developed: the outdoor room enclosed by hedges, the architectural structure softened by generous planting, the romantic and the formal in productive tension.
The garden at Long Barn is rarely visited — it remains a private property — which makes access through our tour particularly valuable. Seeing it alongside Sissinghurst allows guests to trace the evolution of one of the great creative partnerships in the history of English garden design: the same sensibility expressed at different scales and at different moments in a lifetime's work.
Long Barn is smaller and more domestic than Sissinghurst, but it has an intimacy and an authenticity that the more famous garden, now managed by the National Trust for tens of thousands of visitors, inevitably lacks. It is a garden to be encountered quietly, and our small group format makes that possible.