We Made a Garden

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She was educated at the Friends School Saffron Walden and at a secretarial college, before spending twenty years working in Fleet Street, initially with countryside magazines and then with Associated Newspapers. There she accompanied Lord Northcliffe on a war mission to the United States in 1916, and then worked as secretary to six successive editors of the Daily Mail, the last of whom, the widower Walter Fish, she married on 2 March 1933, three years after his retirement. During and after her period with Associated Newspapers she wrote for several other papers and periodicals, including the field-sports magazine The Field.

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. A good bone structure must come first, with an intelligent use of evergreen plants so that the garden is always clothed, no matter what time of year,” wrote Margery in We Made a Garden . In spite of their wildly differing approaches to the garden, this was something her husband Walter had taught her. 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. 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. 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.It made me incredibly sad that her husband’s strong opinions on gardening clashed so much with her own. Honestly, he sounded like a bit of an asshole - cutting down so many of her flowers as they were just starting to bloom, smothering her smaller, beloved plants with manure as he tended to his own favorites, only allowing her to participate in menial gardening tasks. She didn’t seem to truly flourish as a gardener in her own right until he passed away. Margery took up the baton of cottage gardening that started outside humble country dwellings, was romanticised by the likes of William Robinson and reached the height of fashion at gardens such as Hidcote and Sissinghurst. Compared with these famous gardens, East Lambrook was modest in size, covering two acres.

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 ] At the start of World War I, Lord Northcliffe was the most powerful man in Fleet Street, wielding influence at every level. So when in 1917 the prime minister, Lloyd George, asked him to head the British Mission to the USA, Northcliffe immediately requested that Margery be on his staff. It meant crossing the Atlantic under threat of enemy torpedoes, but she accepted without hesitation. The mission spent three years in the USA and Margery was awarded the MBE in recognition of her contribution. In 1937, with the threat of war looming, the Fish’s decided to find a house in the country away from the dangers of central London. They finally settled on the 15th century manor house in the quiet, rural Somerset village of East Lambrook. And so, having never shown the slightest interest in gardening and with no prior knowledge, Margery embarked on her second career, finally becoming one of the most important influences on gardening in the 20th century.Fish [née Townshend], Margery (1892–1969), gardener and author". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/48830. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

Margery Fish (née Townshend) (5 August 1892 – 24 March 1969) was an English gardener and gardening writer, who exercised a strong influence on the informal English cottage garden style of her period. [1] The garden she created, at East Lambrook Manor in Somerset, has Grade I listed status and remains open to the public. The National Portrait Gallery, London possesses two photographs of Margery Fish: Retrieved 2 November 2012. I know that he was right when he wrote that the four essentials of a good garden are perfect lawns, paths, hedges and walls,” Margery wrote later, about her husband’s opinions on elements she had once railed against. “We all know how restful and beautiful a purely formal garden of grass and shaped trees can be.”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. Great gardening women: Margery Fish Margery Fish was a leading proponent of the cottage garden. Find out more about her style and how to create the cottage garden look. In the development of gardening in the second half of the twentieth century no garden has yet had greater effect.” John Sales, National Trust Its driving force was Margery who, having started from scratch, became one of the great gardeners of the 20th century. East Lambrook Manor has changed hands several times since Margery’s death in 1969, but the spirit of her garden remains there and in countless gardens around the country. In 1956 Margery was 64 years old. She had begun her first job before women had the vote. (She had been the secretary to the editor at the Country Gentleman’s Publishing Company before joining the Daily Mail, where she would become Walter’s assistant.) Only now, in late middle age, was she approaching fulfilment. In the weeks after We Made a Garden appeared in Britain’s bookshops, something remarkable happened: a future suddenly opened out before her—and to her astonishment and clear delight, it was more expansive even than her husband’s precious lawn.

So Walter taught me a lesson.... He put into action all the exasperation he felt at a pigheaded woman who just would not learn." In this way, Margery Fish describes how her husband corrected her method of staking plants by mutilating her flowers, tying ropes around their stems so tightly "that they looked throttled" (31). 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. 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] 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.However, according to David St John Thomas writing in 2004, "It was a miracle that [the garden] survived unscathed." 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. However, Robert completed a Royal Horticultural College course, and they were soon employing 28 staff, with a tearoom, shop and art gallery. [14] 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. East Lambrook Manor Gardens is the iconic and quintessentially English cottage garden created by the celebrated 20th-century plantswoman and gardening writer Margery Fish. It was here that she developed her own style of gardening, combining old-fashioned and contemporary plants in a relaxed and informal manner to create a garden of immense beauty and charm. Every issue, The English Garden magazine features the most beautiful gardens from all across the UK and Ireland - both town and country plots, big and small. Inside, you will find invaluable practical advice from real gardeners, plantspeople and designers. There’s stunning photography from the world’s top garden photographers, as well as insightful writing from experts.