Sissinghurst

Product Description

A fascinating account from award-winning author Adam Nicolson of the history of Nicolsons own national treasure his family home: Sissinghurst. Sissinghurst is world-famous as a place of calm & 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 & great sixteenth-century house from the days of its decline as an eighteenth-century prison to a flourishing Victorian farm & on to the creation by his grandparents Vita Sackville-West & 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 & 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 & oilseed rape? Against the odds he was going to try. This paperback edition will be fully updated to cover the first year of Adam Nicolsons endeavour to revive the estate & return it to the glories of its past. More than just a personal biography of a place this book is the story of taking an inheritance & 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 & make them real.