Sissinghurst
Subtitle: an unfinished history
By: Adam Nicolson.
Publisher: HarperPress
Published: 2008
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9780007240548
Subjects: Historic farms -- Conservation and restoration -- England; Family farms -- England -- History; Farm life -- England -- History; Sissinghurst Garden (England) -- History
Description: "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 else: 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"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-331) and index.