Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Adam Nicolson
Harper Press 2008
Sissinghurst is best known as the home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and for the garden they created there; in the last thirty years the National Trust, the house’s owner, has concentrated more on this aspect of the “visitor attraction”, allowing its link to the land to be lost. This is their grandson Adam Nicolson’s account of his attempt to revive the tradition of mixed farming there and to use the produce to supply the shop and restaurant. However, this is more than just the story of how he convinced the trustees and, eventually, set the scheme in motion; he explores in detail the history of the area from the very earliest times. Being no horticulturist and no businessman, it was this part of the book I found most interesting, and his description of the development of ancient paths and woodland is fascinating and thought provoking. He also writes well of his relationships with his grandfather and with his father, the writer Nigel Nicolson, and of the life of Sackville-West. However, I must admit I have always found the “bohemian” antics of the privileged Bloomsbury set trying at the best of times; Nicolson’s description of Vita’s “four wild and radiant months” with her lover Violet Trefusis when she “dressed as Julian, the wounded soldier hero” and “had lived her life of ecstatic freedom away from the bonds of bourgeois normality” didn’t cause me to revise my opinion. And, though I can’t complain that this account of the development of a farm contains a lot of detail about farming, this part of the book was hard work for me. Nicolson is a fine, reflective writer though, and this is much more than a gardening book. In the end he learns that “singular visions do not work; only by accommodation and consensus can the good world be made” – a conclusion that reminded me of Justin Cartwright’s in his excellent novel The Song Before It Is Sung.
8th March 2009
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-sissinghurstcastlegarden/
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