Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History
The Quest to Restore a Working Farm at Vita Sackville-West's Legendary Garden
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A charming portrait of an ancient and beautiful house in Kent [and] a poignant and amusing portrait of the English class system.” —Simon Winchester
From lavish palace for Elizabethan nobles to dreary jailhouse for eighteenth-century prisoners of war, from well-manicured country house for a string of landed families to weed-choked ruin, Sissinghurst, in Kent, has become one of the most illustrious estates in England—and its future may prove to be just as intriguing as its past.
In the 1930s, English poet Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, acquired land that had once been owned by Vita’s ancestors. Together they created elaborate gardens filled with roses, apple trees, vivid flowers, and scenic paths lined with hedges and pink brick walls. Vita, a gardening correspondent for the Observer and a close friend of Virginia Woolf, opened Sissinghurst to the public. But the thriving working farm began to change after her death. Her son Nigel instituted sweeping changes, including transferring ownership of the estate to Britain’s National Trust in 1967 to avoid extensive taxation.
For author Adam Nicolson, the grandson of Harold and Vita, Sissinghurst was always more than a tourist attraction; it was his home. As a boy, Nicolson hiked the same trails that Roman conquerors walked centuries before. With wistful imagination, fascination with natural beauty, and connection to the land, Nicolson has returned home to restore Sissinghurst’s glory. His journey to recreate a sustainable and functioning farm, despite resistance from the National Trust, makes for a compelling memoir of family, history, and the powerful relationship between people and nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nicolson, grandson of poet Vita Sackville-West and diplomat Harold Nicolson best known, perhaps for being Virginia Woolf's lover grew up in the 1960s at Sissinghurst, the ruined castle where Sackville-West created her renowned gardens in the 1930s. The author's father Nigel gave the estate to the National Trust in 1967, and when Nicholson came back to live there after his father, Nigel, died in 2004, he embarked on a campaign to revive a landscape that had forgotten its past. It's through this lens of love for its past and passion for its future that Nicholson relates the story of his quest, embedding it in a history of Sissinghurst, beginning in its origins in clay, forest, and pastures and the custom of Kent a unique culture of self-reliant men and women who depended on the land rather than on a lord following through its transformation into a prison for French prisoners of war in the 18th century and its 20th-century revitalization by Vita and Harold. Nicholson's love of language is equal to his love of the land, and his poetic prose evokes the richness of the landscape he strives to save.
