Raven, Sarah: Vita Sackville West‘s Sissinghurst

Sissinghurst, discovered and transformed in the 1930s by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, is one of the most inspirational gardens in the world. It remains renowned for Harold Nicolson‘s architectural and the vibrant, romantic planting by Vita Sackville-West. Every year it is visited by over 150,000 people. From 1946 to 1957, Vita Sackville-West wrote a weekly column for the Observer about her gardening ideas, drawing on her experiments and experiences at Sissinghurst. Now, Sarah Raven who is married to Vita‘s grandson Adam Nicolson, takes Vita‘s writings and adds her own, to tell us the story of this wonderful garden. This delightful book, illustrated with over 150 black-and-white photos and twenty-four pages of colour - many never seen before - describes the vision and the craft that has made Sissinghurst a place of vitality and beauty. Vita Sackville-West‘s feeling for colour and texture, her belief that gardens can be places of excitement and calm, her knowledge of exotic species and her appreciation of the ordinary, everyday plants are still of great interest and relevance today. She loved daisies, cobnuts, the wildflower seedlings that suddenly appeared in flowerbeds. Her favourite roses could ‘sweep me quite unexpectedly back to those dusky mysterious hours in an Oriental storehouse, where the rugs and carpets of Isfahan and Bokhara and Samarkand were unrolled in their dim but sumptuous colouring and richness of texture for our slow delight . . . Rich as a fig broken open, soft as a ripened peach, flecked as an apricot, coral as a pomegranate, bloomy as a bunch of grapes.‘ Everything you could wish to know about a garden is here.