We Made a Garden

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Margery Fish working at her desk at East Lambrook Manor (picture right).She wrote many articles and books, including the timeless classic, ‘We Made A Garden’, which charts the trials and tribulations of her early years in gardening with Walter Fish at East Lambrook Manor. Margery Fish was a novice at gardening, but she knew that she wanted an informal garden using cottage garden flowers, while allowing also for self-spreading and self-seeding of native plants. There was to be floral interest appearing all the year round. Her husband, on the other hand, preferred a more formal style with extravagant displays of summer flowers. The battle of wills between them was described in the first of her gardening books, We Made a Garden (1956), which is as much about a difficult marriage as about the difficulties of starting a garden from scratch. [4] Sissinghurst is famed for its White Garden, but the concept is fairly widespread. Margery’s developed scheme of white-flowering and silver-leafed plants was modest but attractive. If ever a garden was born of creative tension, it is the one at East Lambrook Manor in Somerset. When Margery Fish moved there with her husband, Walter in 1937, she wished to fill beds with simple cottage garden plants; he desired neat lawns, straight paths and bright summer bedding. Margery went on to record their battle for control in her 1956 book, We Made A Garden; with its passive aggressive tone, it is as much about their marriage as the garden, yet it is still a horticultural classic to be read and re-read.

We Made a Garden by Margery Fish | Waterstones

Condition: Very Good. Very Good condition. Shows only minor signs of wear, and very minimal markings inside (if any). Probably through Northcliffe’s influence, Margery went on to work for the News Editor of the Daily Mail, Walter Fish. He finally became Editor in 1922 and although known as a tyrant, it was his combination of decisiveness and unrestrained zest for life that made him an inspiration to work for. For seven years they worked together in a purely professional manner, but in the Spring of 1930 Margery received a much more personal letter from Walter. Other varieties named after her garden include the spurge Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii 'Lambrook Gold', the cotton lavender Santolina chamaecyparissus 'Lambrook Silver', and the primrose Primula 'Lambrook Mauve'. She hunted out several rare old double forms and single and named coloured forms of primrose. [1] There are varieties of Pulmonaria, Penstemon, Bergenia, Dicentra, Hebe, Euphorbia characias and Hemerocallis named after her. [7] She is credited with aptly naming the variety Astrantia major subsp involucrata 'Shaggy' on discovering it in her garden. [8] For many years Fish indeed used very little gardening help. She squeezed her writing around working 18-hour days on developing and maintaining the garden, even doing dry stone walling and path-laying herself. Her silver garden caught the heat of the day, and her damp, shady garden used a stream that ran behind an old malthouse. The silver-leafed wormwood Artemisia absinthium 'Lambrook Silver' is still a popular variety. Apart from writing eight books of her own, Margery Fish contributed to the Oxford Book of Garden Flowers (1963) and The Shell Gardens Book (1964), [11] and wrote a regular column in the 1950s and 1960s for Amateur Gardening and then Popular Gardening. She also made regular broadcasting appearances and gave lectures. A database compiled in the 1990s of every plant she mentioned in print contains 6500 items, including over 200 single snowdrop varieties. Michael Pollan, reviewing a belated 1996 first US edition of We Made a Garden, called Fish "the most congenial of garden writers, possessed of a modest and deceptively simple voice that manages to delicately layer memoir with horticultural how-to." [12] Legacy [ edit ]With the exception of February the garden is closed on all Sundays and Mondays including Bank Holiday Mondays.) When Margery and Walter Fish bought a neglected medieval manor in rural Somerset as the war loomed, they could not have guessed what it would eventually become. The garden at East Lambrook Manor, open to the public since 1950, has since come to represent the classic cottage garden style.

We Made a Garden - Margery Fish - Google Books

This book charmed me by the cover and hypnotized me with old-fashioned language, both British and Latin. Obsessed gardeners will love it. Others, possibly not. In the development of gardening in the second half of the twentieth century no garden has yet had greater effect.” John Sales, National Trust 1980. That's what this book is all about. Learning and sharing experiences. That's how all gardeners should be and it resumes a lot about the joy of gardening.

This is a charming little book by Margery Fish, offering anecdotal history of the choosing and planting of a home garden in England. According the the introduction, Fish passed decades ago but her garden has recently been restored. He credits her with how we grow our gardens. I think he must be right.