Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West And The Creation Of A Garden, Vita Sackville-West & Sarah Raven -- November 28, 2017

Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West adn the Creation of a Garden, Vita Sackville-West & Sarah Raven, c. 2014

Grapevine Library

DDS: 823 SAC

The author:

A presenter and a teacher; has a school for gardening and cooking at her farm in East Sussex.

Married to the writer Adam Nicolson; they live with their family at Sissinghurst.


Vita Sackville-West: born 1892.

• Husband Harold Nicolson.
• One of the strangest and happiest love stories; portrayed in Portrait of a Marriage by their son Nigel Nicolson.
• Vita died at age 70, in 1962. 

Sarah Raven first saw Sissinghurt 30 years prior to writing the book; then in her mid-20s.

• Training to be a doctor, Charing Cross Hospital. 
• She writes, "A few years after seeing the garden I married Adam, grandson of Vita and Harold, and when his father Nigel became ill and died in 2004, we moved to Sissinghurst. No longer a doctor and now with two children, I had become a gardener, and as someone passionately interested in the beauty of what's around me, I'm lucky to have spent ten years of my life entwined with Vita and Sissinghurst."

So, book was c. 2014; thirty years earlier, would have been 1984; a few years later (when she married Adam) might have been around 1990.

Ten years at Sissinghurst (since around 2004 which matches exactly when her father-in-law Nigel, who had been living at Sissinghurst, died.)

She could have gotten her doctorate around 1990, practiced medicine for about twelve years, until 2002 or so. Perhaps she left medicine when she and her husband moved into Sissinghurst.

1984, in her mid-20s, she would have been born about 1960. She would never have met Vita, but she obviously new Vita's son Nigel, 1917 - 2004. In 1990, Nigel would have been 73 years old.

Her husband Adam wrote a biography of Sissinghurst in 2008: Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History.

Fantastic story. 

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From York, had I known about it, I could have driven it in less than 5 hours; a weekend trip.

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The Book

A map of the grounds.

1: A Brief History

2: Finding the Dream

3: Sissinghurst's Design

Part 2: Vita's Garden Themes

4: A Mixture of All Things

5: A Sophisticated Palette

6: Cram, Cram, Cram

7: Flowering Shrubs

8: Scents

9: Painterly Plants

10: Indoor and Container Gardening

11. Cut Flowers

12: The Recent Past

Sources

Picture Credits

Index