num_pages: 342
description: A fascinating account from award-winning author Adam Nicolson on the history of Nicolson's own national treasure his family Sissinghurst.Sissinghurst is world famous as a place of calm and beauty a garden slipped into the ruins of a rose-pink Elizabethan palace. But is it entirely what its creators intended? Has its success over the last thirty years come at a price? Is Sissinghurst everything it could be? The story of this piece of land an estate in the Weald of Kent is told here for the first time from the very beginning. Adam Nicolson who now lives there has uncovered remarkable new findings about its history as a medieval manor and great sixteenth-century house from the days of its decline as an eighteenth-century prison to a flourishing Victorian farm and on to the creation by his grandparents Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson of a garden in a weed-strewn wreck. Alongside his recovery of the past Adam Nicolson wanted something for the land at Sissinghurst to live again to become the landscape of orchards cattle fruit and sheep he remembered from his boyhood.Could that living frame of a mixed farm be brought back to what had turned into monochrome fields of chemicalised wheat and oilseed rape? Against the odds he was going to try. Adam Nicolson has always been a passionate writer about landscape and buildings but this is different. This is the place he wanted to make good again reconnecting garden farm and land. More than just a personal biography of a place this book is the story of taking an inheritance and steering it in a new direction just as an entrepreneur might take hold of a company or just as all of us might want to take our dreams and make them real.From the Hardcover edition.
language: English
title: Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History
publisher: Harper Press