This image is the cover for the book Sissinghurst

Sissinghurst

From 1946 to 1957, Vita Sackville-West, the British poet, bestselling author of All Passion Spent and maker of Sissinghurst, wrote a weekly column in the Observer depicting her life at Sissinghurst, showing her to be one of the most visionary horticulturalists of the twentieth-century. With wonderful additions by Sarah Raven, a famous British gardener in her own right who is married to Vita's grandson Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst 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 color and originality, it also describes details of the trials and tribulations of crafting a place of beauty and elegance.

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. Sissinghurst is a magnificent portrait of a garden and a family.

Vita Sackville-West, Sarah Raven

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (1892–1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer. A successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist, she published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. Sackville-West was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Orlando: A Biography by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf. She had a longstanding column in the Observer (1946–1961) and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

St. Martin’s Press