A happy return to manure

摘要

Readers of Adam Nicolson's "Earls of Paradise" about Wilton House in Wiltshire will know how passionately he cares about landscape, or rather about the land. "Landscape" suggests something pictorial. Mr Nicolson is not interested in pictures. For him, beauty is a by-product of the way a landscape works and is worked. The view from the window is dynamic: an organism, a cycle, the antithesis of scenery.rnHis new book is about all these things at Sissinghurst in Kent, the Elizabethan castle where his grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, created her famous garden in the 1930s. After her death in 1962, her son Nigel escaped death duties by giving the whole estate-castle and garden, with mixed livestock and arable farm-to the National Trust (a conservation charity), devoting the rest of his life to promoting the place as a shrine to his parents.