Tim Richardson
Heritage Horticulture
Halfway through this singular book I misread the phrase ‘the historical soil’ of Sissinghurst as ‘the hysterical soil’ – an understandable assumption to make, perhaps, because by this time the story had become a nightmarish journey into the neurotically beating heart of an historically compromised and jealously fought-over corner of England.
Adam Nicolson is the grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, who together made the celebrated Kentish garden that today, under the auspices of the National Trust, attracts several hundred thousand visitors each season. Nicolson was brought up there, sees it as home and clearly feels passionately about it still: ‘I do not own it but it is my place’, he declares on Page One.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3