Sissinghurst. An Unfinished History

Сиссингхерст прославился на весь мир, как тихий и красивый сад, разбитый на руинах елизаветинского дворца. Полностью ли была реализована задумка его создателей? Какую цену пришлось заплатить за его успех? Может ли из него получиться что-то большее? В своей книге Sissinghurst. An Unfinished History Адам Николсон впервые рассказывает полную историю своего нового дома. Ему удалось раскрыть удивительные подробности из его прошлого. Сиссингхерст был и средневековым поместьем, и тюрьмой, и викторианской фермой, а предки Николсона – Вита Сэквилл-Уэст и Гарольд Николсон – превратили его в цветущие сады. Книга на английском языке. A fascinating account from award-winning author Adam Nicolson of the history of Nicolson’s own national treasure, his family home: Sissinghurst. Sissinghurst is world-famous as a place of calm and beauty, a garden slipped into the ruins of a rose-pink Elizabethan palace. But is it entirely what its creators intended? Has its success over the last thirty years come at a price? Is Sissinghurst everything it could be? The story of this piece of land, an estate in the Weald of Kent, is told here for the first time from the very beginning. Adam Nicolson, who now lives there, has uncovered remarkable new findings about its history as a medieval manor and great sixteenth-century house, from the days of its decline as an eighteenth-century prison to a flourishing Victorian farm and on to the creation, by his grandparents Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, of a garden in a weed-strewn wreck. Alongside his recovery of the past, Adam Nicolson wanted something else: for the land at Sissinghurst to live again, to become the landscape of orchards, cattle, fruit and sheep he remembered from his boyhood. Could that living frame of a mixed farm be brought back to what had turned into monochrome fields of chemicalised wheat and oilseed rape? Against the odds, he was going to try. This paperback edition will be fully updated to cover the first year of Adam Nicolson’s endeavour to revive the estate and return it to the glories of its past. More than just a personal biography of a place, this book is the story of taking an inheritance and steering it in a new direction, just as an entrepreneur might take hold of a company, or just as all of us might want to take our dreams and make them real.