Sissinghurst
Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From 1946 to 1957, Vita Sackville-West, the British poet, bestselling author of All Passion Spent and maker of Sissinghurst, wrote a weekly column in the Observer depicting her life at Sissinghurst, showing her to be one of the most visionary horticulturalists of the twentieth-century. With wonderful additions by Sarah Raven, a famous British gardener in her own right who is married to Vita's grandson Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst draws on this extraordinary archive, revealing Vita's most loved flowers, as well as offering practical advice for gardeners. Often funny and completely accessibly written with color and originality, it also describes details of the trials and tribulations of crafting a place of beauty and elegance.
Sissinghurst has gone on to become one of the most visited and inspirational gardens in the world and this marvellous book, illustrated with drawings and original photographs throughout, shows us how it was created and how gardeners everywhere can use some of the ideas from both Sarah Raven and Vita Sackville-West. Sissinghurst is a magnificent portrait of a garden and a family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Sackville-West (1892 1962) was also a gardener and wrote brilliantly on horticulture. To pair contemporary garden writing with Sackville-West's classic sparklers takes confidence, experience, and audacity. Happily, Raven (The Cutting Garden), another gardener in the Sackville-West family (she's married to Vita's grandson), meets every challenge in this laudable book. Sackville-West's plantings complemented the designs of her husband, Harold Nicholson, who wanted to revitalize Sissinghurst, a "ruined Elizabethan hunting palace... in the pretty wooded part of the Kentish Weald." Both women address "The People and the Place," touchstones in Sissinghurst's design; both also consider the big picture in "Vita's Garden Themes," which explains Sackville-West's "cram-cram" planting, and in "The Smaller Canvas," which covers cut flowers, container plants, and even garden "jokes" and Christmas plants. The book is crammed with photos and quotes (from Sackville-West: "A flowerless room is a soul-less room..."). The two voices remain distinct without clashing, and Raven's organization of the book and selections from Sackville-West's work buttress her own canny observations.
