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, as estate in the Weald of Kent, is told here for the first time from the very beginning. Adam Nicolsom, 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 & 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 childhood.
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 just might want to take our dreams and make them real.
When this book arrived in the mail, DD#1 took off the dustcover and started to read it. It must have looked interesting and must have been good to hold her interest.
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Julie
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