Edwin Lutyens, long-time gardening partner of Gertrude Jekyll, was a friend to both Sackville-West and Nicolson and a frequent visitor to Long Barn, and gave advice regarding Sissinghurst. Sackville-West denied that Jekyll's work had an impact on her own designs, but Nigel Nicolson described Lutyens' influence as "pervasive". Fleming and Gore go further, suggesting that the use of groupings of colours "followed Jekyll"; "a purple border, a cottage garden in red, orange and yellow, a walled garden pink purple, a white garden, a herb garden". Scott-James notes however that herbaceous borders, "Jekyll's speciality", were much disliked by Sackville-West. Other influencers and friends were the noted plantswoman Norah Lindsay, the plant collector Collingwood Ingram, who was their neighbour at Benenden, and Reginald Cooper, one of Nicolson's closest friends, whose earlier garden at Cothay Manor in Somerset has been described as the "Sissinghurst of the West Country". Sackville-West's considerable knowledge of old roses was deepened by her friendship with Edward Bunyard, plantsman, epicure, and the author of "Old Garden Roses", who was a frequent visitor. The historian Peter Davey places the garden at the very end of a tradition of Arts and Crafts gardening which by the 1930s, in the face of changes in "taste and economics", had almost come to its close.