Product Description

A fascinating account from award-winning author Adam Nicolson of the history of Nicolson's own national treasure, his family home: 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 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. This paperback edition will be fully updated to cover the first year of Adam Nicolson's endeavour to revive the estate and 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 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5342 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
"Nicolson's book is as much about community, joint effort and co-operation as it is a love letter to his home and his disparate, sometime difficult, but always fascinating family" INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY --INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

"a masterpiece of rural romanticism...the narrative is charmingly interspersed with tales from Sissinghurst's past" Sunday Times --SUNDAY TIMES

"This book, by an outstanding social historian and nature-writer who also happens to be heir to one of England's best loved houses, really does break new ground in the literature of locality....sumptuously evokes the house, its tangled history, and the Bloomsbury icons who...lived there" The Independent --THE INDEPENDENT

"fascinating....elegant and perceptive ...his passion makes this a gripping account." The Observer -- THE OBSERVER

"lively...engaging" Daily Telegraph --DAILY TELEGRAPH

"a beautifully expressed exploration of the estate ...poignant" The Guardian
-- THE GUARDIAN

Review
"Nicolson's book is one of those rare things: a story that seems small...and yet which blooms in front of our eyes...It's a beautiful, fascinating, touching account"

Review
"This necessarily self-deceptive and often beautiful book plumbs those depths much more deeply than do most of the existing paens to this celebrated place"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written
As a great collector of all things Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Sissinghurst, I leapt on this book as it appeared. But did I really need it? Surely I have read everything printed about Sissinghurst, Vita and Harold, and visited the garden twice, what could it give me? Well for a start Adam Nicolson writes with more facility, imagination and poetry than either of his famous grand parents. A poetic grace, so beautifully expressed, that Vita would have killed to have had. Yes this is prose and not poetry, but Nicolson, like Virginia Woolf can make prose sound like poetry. In this book Nicolson re-examines Sissinghurst from its historic beginnings, to its "decline" to a tourist attraction. His dealings with the National Trust are fascinating, and believable. I found touching his writing of his father, Nigel, Harold and Vita's second son. Nigel, as a son of a most unconventional marriage, it is no wonder his world was really quite dysfunctional. I rather think the conservative Vita, Harold and Nigel would rather be alarmed at what most of Adam has written. For this reason the book is fascinating.

Super absorbing read
I own every book Adam Nicolson has written. He writes beautiful prose and he writes with great sincerity and feeling. This was another book in the same glorious tradition and immensely enjoyable. Precious few authors can write as well as this

Atmospheric
A beautifully written, atmospheric book which took me back to an idyllic, hot summer's day at Sissinghurst. Mr Nicholson portrays the frustrations of trying to cope with a treasured posession which is owned by someone else with great 'diplomacy'. An absorbing and relaxing read...