Troy Scott Smith will guide you through the Garden Conservancy online course of a gardening year at Sissinghurst. Troy will share with you how the garden looks, which flowers are blooming at each season, and what the garden looked like when it was first created in the 1930s. He will uncover the secrets of pruning and propagation and the art of the English Garden. Each episode will be packed with information, all simply explained and illustrated, giving you techniques and confidence to put into practice in your own garden. The Winter episode will take place Thursday, December 7 at 2 pm Eastern. The bare blanket of earth that for many is the “winter garden,” need not be. If harnessed, the potency of the season can be as exhilarating as the heady explosion of summer. Pockets of evergreen planting, almost unnoticed in summer, are now an essential ingredient, exuding a presence and injecting solidity into the sparseness of the scene. Coatings of hoarfrost re-order the prominence of their outlines. Spring plants eager to steal a march on their competitor’s race to flower. There is nothing that disappoints about the winter garden, and in this final episode, Troy will share with you some of the possibilities to make winter in the garden a season to look forward to and enjoy.
Sissinghurst was created nearly a century ago by the writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson as a private home and as refuge dedicated to natural beauty. Today it is owned by the National Trust and visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Troy’s career has been devoted to the beauty and romance of gardening. Since joining the National Trust of England, Wales & Northern Ireland in 1990, Troy has led some of the world’s most beautiful gardens, among them the Courts (Wiltshire), Bodnant (Wales), and two stints at Sissinghurst (Kent), where he has led a remarkable transformation and restoration of the Vita Sackville-West gardens.
$5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
