Devotees of Facebook’s Farmville game — or anyone who fantasizes about deep roots and a family homeplace — would love this purportedly little book.
Purportedly little, because while focused on one location, one family, one slice of British literary history, the book sprawls over and under and through those tight boundaries like rampant vines through a hedge. Adam Nicolson’s portrait of his family home stretches across 1,500 years of human settlement and all of the relationships between humans and the land: the ways we wrest a living from it, the way we shape meaning and connection and art from a place.
Sissinghurst is the National Trust-administered garden created by poet Vita Sackville- West, sometime lover of Virginia Woolf, and the home, farmland, streams and woods that surround the garden. The property was conveyed to Britain’s National Trust by Sackville-West’s son, Nigel, author Adam Nicolson’s father.
Sackville-West, who bought the sprawling property, never wanted it to be “saved” by government ownership, tourism and commercialism, but like many owners of historic British homes in the 1950s and ’60s, Nigel found public ownership to be the only way for his family to afford to continue living there. His son, the author, moved back to the now-dessicated place after Nigel’s death.
Almost as soon as he returned, he began to envision a shift in how the tourist attraction was run. His idea: Grow lunch. Create a working, organic, self-sustaining and teaching farm whose products would be used in the current on-site restaurant. Restore the property’s complexity, its vibrancy, its myriad layers of meaning — now as depleted in the new century as the farm’s once-rich soil.
Beginning the metamorphosis was anything but easy. What Nicolson viewed as a restoration, a return to the diversified working farm he knew as a child, with its vast, fragrant barns for the drying of hops and its pigs, sheep, cattle and chickens, Sissinghurst’s current caretakers viewed as desecration. After all, they had been tending the highly successful (meaning profitable) garden, restaurant and shop for 17 years as a public treasure.
What makes the book a rich, if at times dizzying, treasure is that Nicolson traces Sissinghurst’s history far back, into England’s post- Roman era, and then sweeps far forward in time — often in the same paragraph.
Within the bounds of Sissinghurst, he writes, “you can still see, in a low evening light, the shallow swellings and hollows of medieval strip cultivation on the light soils that modern agriculture no longer considers worth plowing, but that in the Dark Ages and the centuries that followed would have been invaluable. . . . But Sissinghurst also had its woods for heating and buildings. It had streams of sweet fresh water coming down through those woods. . . . Even in the 1920s, the gentlemen farmers who then owned Sissinghurst, the Cheesemans, used to bottle up the water and take it to families living out in the clay vale. . . .”
Then, on the next page, we’re airlifted to the year 843, when the king of Kent gave over much of the region to an underling who would drive his pigs north to Sissinghurst for fattening on the acorns that would begin to fall on the autumn equinox: “Anyone who interfered with the pigs, the charter makes clear, would suffer ‘everlasting damnation.’ “
So many compressed layers of history, such depth of rootedness, can be almost too intoxicating for mere colonials who honor “century farms” and “century trees” as rarities. In one photo, Nicolson stands beneath a Sissinghurst oak that was young in Elizabeth I’s time.
Nicolson recounts the decades of the farm’s shift to chemical inputs, the gradual removal of the animals and their manure that had maintained the productivity of the soil. Year after year of intensively farmed cereal crops debases a meadow, the most valued form of acreage in medieval times because it fed the animals that pulled the plows. It’s not only the animals who are missed: Gone, too, is the community of human lives the farm supported, if only at subsistence level, with its various jobs.
Through it all winds the tale of Nicolson’s ongoing dealings with the realities of public-trust economics — “Meetings! I have never sat around so many tables in my life,” he recounts — and aesthetics: “I don’t really mind veg but I do mind the view from the top of the tower,” the head gardener tells him.
The bureaucratic vignettes would be drab fare if not enriched by the author’s obvious reverence for the place and his eventual submission to its need to serve multiple dreams and purposes. He is anything but self-unaware.
He grills himself, nearly tortures himself: Is his vision of a diversified farm and orchard that grows the food the restaurant serves, and more important, grows it organically, crazy? Self-serving? Completely impractical?
He doesn’t simply ask the question and then justify his own response. He gives time and space and some credence to a successful, high-tech wheat farmer who still frames the dilemma as this: If everyone farmed organically, who would decide which 50 million people would starve?
In the end, Nicolson wins you over for the sheer, undiluted purity of his intentions and his passion for this particular place and all of its histories — literary, national, natural and intensely personal. “In my own mind,” he says, “I have arrived at a particular phrase: the honorable landscape. Honor is the only thing that survives death.”
NONFICTION
Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History
by Adam Nicolson, $27.95
