A literary, horticultural, and personal tour of the legendary writer and gardener’s houses and gardens, the places that gave her work and her life a vital sense of self.

Born in 1892 at Knole, a Jacobean palace and treasure house, Vita died seventy years later at Sissinghurst, where she had created one of England’s loveliest and most celebrated gardens. Throughout her life, she lived in extraordinary places, fascinated and inspired by their histories. An obsession with her ancestry and with Knole—the monumental house in which she grew up—remained central throughout her life but which, as a woman and therefore inhibited by the law of the land, she had been prevented from inheriting. Immediately after her father’s death Vita left Knole forever, moving to Long Barn, just a couple of miles away. This new house, like Knole, albeit on a fraction of the scale, was an amalgam of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson, called the house and garden their “little mud pie,” and it became the site of Vita’s first major foray into garden design. 

Later, Vita, Harold, and their two young sons, moved to Sissinghurst, where they transformed a ruined castle and a tumbledown farm into the garden it is today: arguably her greatest creation and most enduring legacy. Vita’s glorious residences—both inside and out—are a key to her identity. Images in the book—including many never-published period photographs and rich, new works—illustrate her dazzling world. The two authors, both members of her family, offer their unique perspective into the life and passions of a twentieth-century iconoclast.

About The Author

Robert Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville, is an author and the custodian of Knole. Juliet Nicolson is a British author and journalist and a granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West.