Sissinghurst

An Unfinished History

Sissinghurst is world famous as a place of beauty, a garden slipped into the ruins of an Elizabethan palace. But is it entirely what its creators intended?

Adam Nicolson has uncovered remarkable new findings about its history as a medieval manor 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 become the landscape of orchards, cattle and sheep he remembered from his boyhood. Could that living frame of a mixed farm be brought back? Against the odds, he was going to try.

©2009 Adam Nicolson (P)2009 Isis Publishing Ltd