For tens of thousands of people around the world, the garden at Sissinghurst is the embodiment of English beauty, gentility and grace. But for me, when I was a boy, it was the most exciting racetrack on the planet. I lived at Sissinghurst with my parents and sisters, and for my 6th birthday in 1964 I was given two things: a new Raleigh and a watch with a second hand. I had my own racing circuit outside the kitchen door. The start was at the front of the house, between the 19th century bronze urns and the floppy arms of the old rosemary bushes: down through the medieval gateway into the upper courtyard, sharp right in front of the pink-brick Elizabethan tower swathed in clematis, across the lawn and through the narrow gateway into the rose garden — a terrifyingly spiny acanthus bush on the corner there — a zigzag through the alliums and the mounds of old roses before hitting the fastest of all straights through the Lime Walk and under the branching hazels of the Nuttery, where I would finally skid to a halt outside the Herb Garden. The whole thing, which is slightly downhill, could be done in just under a minute. I must have looked like a skateboarder in the National Gallery.

More often than not, though, there was a problem, an interruption that played havoc with my attempts to beat the record: "the visitors," as they were always politely called, 40,000 or 50,000 of them every year, that figure tripling as I got into my teens. Time after time, I'd come hurtling through the gateway into the rose garden and slap straight into the Greater Cincinnati Horticultural Society, deep in admiration of the finest specimen they'd ever seen of Souvenir du

Sissinghurst encapsulates an idea of beauty that goes beyond the everyday. It can be ineffable, otherworldly

Docteur Jamain. My grandparents, Harold Nicolson, the diplomat, writer and politician, and Vita Sackville-West, poet, gardener and novelist, who together made Sissinghurst, had referred to them as "the shillings," but by the 1960s that kind of talk was no longer allowed. Vita had always thought of Sissinghurst as her refuge from the horrors of the modern world, and for her the shillings were merely a necessity, to be submitted to with polite reluctance. My father, Nigel, who had inherited the house, garden and farm on Vita's death in 1962, had a more democratic attitude. The "visitors" or even the "people" were the whole point of Sissinghurst. The garden was for them and we should treat them as if they owned the place. One of my earliest memories is being appointed to car-parking duties on a busy Sunday. Elaborate signals and explicit politeness were required, as if I were a trainee in butler school. My sisters helped with the making of scones, while my father, playing the modern seigneur, had the habit of leaning out of the kitchen window and asking strangers in for tea. We hid upstairs.

There was an unavoidable economic fact underlying this high-mindedness. My father was confronted with huge death duties payable on his mother's estate and had a stark choice: sell Sissinghurst or persuade the Treasury that in lieu of death duties they should accept the entire property and give it to the National Trust, who would allow us to continue living there. A skeptical Trust would only take it on if assured of a steady visitor stream, and so being nice to the visitors was our lifeline to the future. There was no way we could afford to live there without them. Finally, in 1967, with visitor numbers rising, the Trust agreed, and the house, garden and farm were transferred to their ownership with an agreement that we could go on living there for three generations.

It was a strange set of circumstances in which to grow up: a shared place, increasingly a shrine to Vita's memory, a public possession but for us a private passion. Away at school, my habitual doodles were plans of the garden and drawings of the tower. I loved the garden — and even more the woods and fields around it, the stream beside the lake, and the way in which the garden was not just an expensive bauble, a tight, perfect thing, but seemed to emerge from the thickened landscape of the Kentish Weald around it.