It made me incredibly sad that her husband’s strong opinions on gardening clashed so much with her own. Here, for the first time she also found herself working for the newspaper’s founder, Lord Northcliffe, known to his staff as ‘The Chief’.

Current gardener Whitty sums up the policy on opportunists as, “If it is not in the way and it looks good, leave it. A passion for nature and ability to mix plants effectively even in the smallest space and in differing environments, made her ideas relevant to all gardeners of her time and for future generations of gardeners. But their new country house in East Lambrook comes with a farmyard, so Margery and Walter—metropolitan flat-dwellers who haven’t a pair of secateurs between them—will somehow have to create a garden “from a farmyard and a rubbish tip. Robert and Mary Anne Williams bought it after visiting the house in the dark and had no inkling of the garden's importance, with its two longstanding gardeners, or knowledge of Margaret Fish.From Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties by Rachel Cooke Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Cooke. 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. With the flowers (which her husband considered the least important part of the garden) dead, perhaps Margery would pay more attention to keeping the paths neat. My grandmother's purple primroses are long gone and I cannot seem to get replacements to settle, but there is always salal, a native bush much-loved by florists for its leathery leaves, and loved by my family for the berries I use like blueberries in muffins. I had to pull out my phone so many times to Google them to get an idea of how they looked; a visual glossary of some sort would be a nice addition.

In 1951, she wrote her first piece on gardening for The Field, and went on to publish numerous magazine articles and eight books. She couldn’t tell Walter at the time what she thought of him, but she can say whatever the hell she likes now. Crammed with good advice … I defy any amateur gardener not to find pleasure, encouragement and profit from [it]. The result is that aquilegias, hardy geraniums, Welsh poppies ( Meconopsis cambrica), astrantias, Sicilian honey garlic ( Nectaroscordum siculum ) and Byzantine gladiolus ( Gladiolus communis ssp.First published in 1956, We Made a Garden is the story of how Margery Fish, the leading gardener of the 1960s, and her husband Walter transformed an acre of wilderness into a stunning cottage garden, still open to the public at East Lambrook Manor, Somerset, England. She squeezed her writing around working 18-hour days on developing and maintaining the garden, even doing dry stone walling and path-laying herself. The National Portrait Gallery, London possesses two photographs of Margery Fish: Retrieved 2 November 2012.

What struck me is the amount of labor they put into the garden themselves, both because labor was scarce in WWII England, and because they truly wanted to do the work. The husband is older and overbearing, but Margery comes into her own, especially after his death, and becomes a noteworthy gardener herself. Unimaginable as it sounds, during the war years, flowers had all but disappeared from view: urged on by government pamphlets with titles like “Cloches v. It is written in a lovely informal style discussing her successes and failures as she created her garden.

When she wrote about East Lambrook she gave her readers a sense of possibility—and in this sense, she provided a bridge between gardening’s high-maintenance past and its low-maintenance future.