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Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History: The Quest to Restore a Working Farm at Vita Sackville-West's Legendary Garden

Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History: The Quest to Restore a Working Farm at Vita Sackville-West's Legendary Garden

by Adam Nicolson (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2010

    $3.29
Synopsis

A bestselling author's passionate memoir about restoring life to one of the world's greatest gardens Sissinghurst Castle is a jewel in the English countryside. Its chief attraction is its celebrated garden, designed in the 1930s by the poet Vita Sackville-West, lover of Virginia Woolf. As a boy, Adam Nicolson, Sackville-West's grandson, spent his days romping through Sissinghurst's woods, streams, and fields. In this book, he returns to the place of his bucolic youth and finds that the estate, now operated by Britain's National Trust, has lost something precious. It is still unquestionably a place of calm and beauty but, he asks, where is the working farm, the orchards, the cattle and sheep? Nicolson convinces the Trust to embrace a simple idea: Grow lunch for the two hundred thousand annual visitors. Sissinghurst is a personal biography of a place and an inspiring story of one man's quest to return a remarkable landscape to its best, most useful purpose. Nicolson is an entertaining and charming writer and this book will capture fans of Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

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Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 352
 Edition: 1
 Publisher: Viking Books
Published: 06 May 2010
ISBN 10: 0670021733
ISBN 13: 9780670021734

Media Reviews
In his quest to restore his family home of Sissinghurst to its rightful place as a working farm and productive part of the England's food web, Nicolson creates a flawless narrative of enchantment, a bricolage of impermeable clay, crumbling castles, tucked away wildwoods, civic inertia, medieval history and a haunting childhood, as magical a work of art as his grandmother Vita Sackville-West's white garden. -Paul Hawken, Author of Blessed Unrest and The Ecology of Commerce To see Vita Sackville-West's legendary garden return to life as an edible landscape fills me with hope. Adam Nicolson's determination to restore a working farm in complete harmony with one of the world's most famous and beautiful gardens is faithful not only to the memory of his family but also to the memory of the land itself. Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History has all the elements of a wonderful drama, but ultimately its message about the importance of good stewardship of the land and of nourishing the community prevails. It is clear that like his famous grandmother, Nicolson is a scribe of The Land. -Alice Waters, Founder of Chez Panisse and Author of The Art of Simple Food and many Chez Panisse cookbooks This wise and tender book, unsentimentally devoted to the story of one tiny corner of old England, should touch each one of us who loves the wild magic that is land, landscape and the creatures that live there. On one level Sissinghurst is a charming portrait of an ancient and beautiful house in Kent; on another a poignant and amusing portrait of the English class system at full gallop. Most important, though, it is a clarion call for the preservation of all that is good, sensible and environmentally prudent about the farming ways of old, a cry that will linger for a long, long while. -Simon Winchester, Author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, and Krakatoa Praise from the UK for Sissinghurst Unusua