Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden by Vita Sackville-West & Sarah Raven soon to be presented for sale on the terrific BookLovers of Bath web site!
Published: London: Virago, 2014, Hardback in dust wrapper.
Contains: Black & white photographs; Chronological tables [1]; Colour photographs; List of sources; Photographic end papers & blanks;
From the cover: 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 Nicolsons 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 Vitas grandson Adam Nicolson, takes Vitas 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-Wests 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.
Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper.
Green boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XVIII] 382 pages. Index. 8¾” x 6¼”.
Of course, if you don’t like this one, may I entice you with something lovely from my Gardening catalogue?
BookLovers of Bath 