BOOK OF THE DAY: Patrick Bowereviews Sissinghurst: An Unfinished Historyby Adam Nicolson
SISSINGHURST IS the famous garden in Kent created by Harold Nicolson and his wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West. They expended their life and fortune to create what became one of the iconic gardens of the 20th century.
Now owned by the National Trust, it has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors during its annual six-month opening period. Tourism has been damaging the place to such an extent that it is now necessary for visitors to arrange a timed visit during the peak summer months.
Sissinghurst was the forerunner of all the 20th century gardens that combined formality of plan with informality of planting. In the early 20th century, it was thought this kind of garden was best achieved by a man and wife team like that of the Nicolsons, the man providing the geometrical expertise for the layout, the woman following with the exuberance of her planting. Not surprisingly, this was later considered a narrow, sexist view.
But this book is not about the garden. Written by the makers' grandson, it is about the land that surrounds the garden. In the form of a landscape biography, the book examines the minutiae of the land's history and, in particular, of those people who formed it, the flora and fauna that inhabit it as well as the etymology of its place names.
The author remembers vividly the mixed farming carried out around the garden in his youth and how it was replaced by "extractive agriculture" - mass-produced wheat and oilseed rape with a consequent impoverishment of life - animal, vegetable and mineral.
Having succeeded his grandparents and parents as tenant of part of the property, he sought a way of returning it to the richness it had in the time of his youth. But such small-scale mixed farming is surely uneconomic at the present time?
He agrees but saw a rare opportunity at Sissinghurst, with its myriad of visitors who were of the kind interested in the new movements for organic and local produce, slow food and the like. The produce of a mixed farm could be sold in the garden's shop and restaurant with an added premium on account of the Sissinghurst "brand". The massive retail potential of the famous garden could be garnered to make a small modern mixed farm financially viable.
To conceive the idea was one thing - to achieve it another. The book details Adam Nicolson's struggle against entrenched opinion, and the gradual acceptance by the National Trust bureaucracy - including the 200 people who are employed by the garden both annually and seasonally - of the practicality of his ideas and, finally, their implementation.
Such an opportunity does not exist for all our farmland, but it shows what a singular vision, combined with a consensus approach to its achievement, can realise. With the reintroduction of farm animals, visitors can now "smell the farm as they go into the garden". The garden has a real context, whereas before it seemed a kind of ersatz and precious version of nature, unrelated to its environment.
Nicolson was privileged to be able to return the land around where he lives to the happy state that he remembers as a boy. Not all of us are so privileged. Surely if privilege has any justification, it is that it be used for the common good as it has been used by Nicolson, as well as the National Trust, at Sissinghurst. He saw that Sissinghurst, like all "products", needed to renew itself with a new kind of response to a changing world.
• Sissinghurst: An Unfinished HistoryBy Adam Nicolson Harper Press 342 pp, £20
• Patrick Bowe is writing the guidebook to the garden at the Getty Villa in California