Vita Sackville West's Sissinghurst

@2@From 1946 to 1957, Vita Sackville-West, the poet, bestselling author of @18@All Passion Spent @19@and maker of Sissinghurst, wrote a weekly column in the @18@Observer @19@describing her life at Sissinghurst, showing her to be one of the most visionary horticulturalists of the twentieth-century.@3@@2@With wonderful additions by Sarah Raven, @18@Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst @19@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 colour and originality, it also describes details of the trials and tribulations of crafting a place of beauty and elegance.@3@@2@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.@3@

A joy . . . [Sarah Raven's book is] about beauty, enjoyment, celebration of making - everything that good gardening ought to be. Its atmosphere is as consoling as sun-warmed brick. It is fastidiously illustrated by beautiful photographs old and new. Raven believes, justifiably, that a dynamic past can instruct the present and her book is a bid to see that Vita's thinking is not stilled . . . Best of all is the dashing abundance of plant ideas . . . Sarah Raven proves a most graceful chaperone, chiming in, amplifying . . . This book and Vita's ideas will inspire and, if you are even half a gardener, have you reaching for your gardening gloves with new purpose

Vorwort
A lavish hardback celebrating one of Britain's best-loved gardens.

Autorentext

Sarah Raven, writer, cook, broadcaster and teacher, runs cooking, flower arranging, growing and gardening courses at the school she set up in 1999 at her farm in East Sussex. She has written three cookery books, as well as Wild Flowers and four gardening books including The Cutting Garden. Sarah Raven is married to the writer Adam Nicolson and has lived with her family at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent.

Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent. A distinguished critic, biographer, award-winning poet, novelist and gardener, she published twelve novels, including All Passion Spent and The Edwardians. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf is celebrated in Woolf's novel, Orlando, and the story of her life with Harold Nicolson, one of the strangest and happiest love stories, was portrayed in Portrait of a Marriage by their son Nigel Nicolson. She died at Sissinghurst, aged seventy, in 1962.

Klappentext

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 design 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.

Zusammenfassung
A lavish hardback celebrating one of Britain's best-loved gardens.