We Made a Garden

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Margery Fish came to gardening in her mid-forties after a career as a secretary to Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail. She married Walter Fish, editor of the paper, in 1933 and in 1937 they bought East Lambrook Manor, then a dilapidated medieval hall house and derelict farm. She had never gardened before but it soon became her passion. East Lambrook became famous through her articles for magazines such as Amateur Gardening and through her many books about the garden. Her first, We Made a Garden, published in 1956, has encouraged generations of budding gardeners. I cannot stress too much the importance of well-cut grass, good paths and well-trimmed hedges. With wifely stubbornness I am afraid I used to argue the point in my husband's lifetime, resenting his oft-repeated assertion that my part of the garden - the flowers - didn't really matter. I know now that he was right when he said that the four essentials of a good garden are... Like Fish, I wanted a garden that was pretty in every season, that bloomed throughout the year. I also want at least some of the plants to be useful in my kitchen. Chives are thriving and so pretty I hate to cut them.

The National Portrait Gallery, London possesses two photographs of Margery Fish: Retrieved 2 November 2012.

All the titles have been reprinted in various forms at various times. Several have been translated into German, Dutch, Italian and other languages. It is a style that goes well with plantsmanship, a word which to detractors means only a kind of one-upmanship and obscurantism (indeed a kind of snobbery, the besetting sin of the gardener), but which in its positive sense connotes a delight in diversity and a desire to explore genus and species to the fullest. Rarity and curiousness are more at a premium in the plants-woman's garden than showiness. Colours are "subtle". A premium is put on handsome foliage, and it is not enough (at the most rarefied heights of plantsmanship) to have an example of an interesting species - one should have a particularly fine form of that species, preferably one either collected from the wild or acquired from a celebrated plant-hunter or gardener.

Margery Fish died in South Petherton Hospital, Somerset, on 24 March 1969, leaving her house and garden to a nephew, Henry Boyd-Carpenter. He and other relatives kept up the garden and extended the nursery. [1] They were sold in 1985, but the next owners, Andrew and Dodo Norton, maintained the garden and nursery and continued to develop the legacy of Margery Fish, before handing over to the Williams family in 1999. [13] 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] The iconic cottage garden at East Lambrook Manor is the creation of celebrated 20th-century plantswoman and gardening writer Margery Fish. Here she developed her own unselfconscious approach to gardening, combining both contemporary and old-fashioned plants in a relaxed and informal manner to create a garden of great beauty and charm.The Lido and Ditch Gardens are damp areas that, along with the Wooded Helleborus Garden, contain most of the garden’s extensive collection of snowdrops. The garden also has collections of hellebores, mainly Helleborus x hybridus, and geraniums. A special raised display bed allows named snowdrops in February and geraniums in summer to be seen at close quarters. 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. The present owners, Gail and Mike Werkmeister, took over in 2008. The garden is open to the public regularly and some Royal Horticultural Society and Yeovil College horticulture courses are held there. [15] Books [ edit ] Margery Fish became an avid galanthophile or snowdrop enthusiast. Her book A Flower for Every Day includes an account of the giant snowdrop variety "S. Arnott", first exhibited at a Royal Horticultural Society exhibition in 1951 and acquired by her from a specialist company. There were said in 2008 still to be 60 different named varieties of Galanthus nivalis growing at East Lambrook. [9] Several snowdrop varieties discovered in the "ditch garden" at Lambrook since Margery Fish's death have been named and described. [10] Writing [ edit ] 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]

Oh give me such a 14ft pole with a forked end and let me loose on this interesting and pleasant work, so that I can catch and guide these freely waving shoots of the old climbing roses, and paint my picture with them "with upright spring! with downward swag!" in the heights of a yew tree, on one of those odds and ends of unclassified places about my home grounds. 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] My yard used to be given over to our Afghan Hounds, but as our children grew we let the dogs go. That is, we did not show or lure course, breed or buy more dogs. They gradually aged and died, and there was my grandmother's yard waiting for some attention. We had only one dog when the men took out the gravel and brought in topsoil. I planted blue and violet and white flowers, evergreen shrubs, and sages. I allowed the orange montbrecia and carmine escalonia that do so well on the coast, but also a richly scented old white rugosa rose, rosemary, and blue ceanothus. I have hydrangeas grown from cuttings (and quite purple in our acid soil). I have tried flowering annuals with uneven success. The battle with horsetails will never end, the butterfly bush mostly feeds bugs, the escalonia requires a firm hand to prevent it taking over the world. Barnsley, with its lively pink flowers gave us several gorgeous years of flowers from spring through November, but finally gave up. I have the firebrand "Lucifer" variety of montbrecia in addition to the more common pure orange. The hostas are determined and often send up their pretty spikes of blooms. 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. One thing I never discovered and that was whether he was deliberately trying to teach me to leave experimental gardening alone until I had learnt to grow the ordinary things properly. I assumed that these regrettable incidents were not intentional, but they may have been part of a campaign.

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. 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 ] You do not have to covet the tower room in Sissinghurst Castle, you do not have to be wearing jodhpurs, to feel the charm of this thought, that you might be quietly reading or in leisurely conversation, and there might be a vase of peonies nearby, and a flowerhead would fall, and you would notice it, because that's the kind of beauty-noticing person you would be . This was the direction in which Margery Fish was moving, and from this and her other writings it is clear that she thought of all these plants she acquired, propagated, and distributed to visitors and friends as her "babies". But in this book it is also clear that Walter has sensed this baby symbolism, and that he resents it: A visit to Germany in 1937 convinced Walter Fish that war was inevitable and that they should move to the countryside. They eventually bought East Lambrook Manor in the Somerset parish of Kingsbury Episcopi in November of that year. The house, which was designated a Grade II* listed building in 1959, [3] was built of Somerset hamstone in the 15th and 16th centuries and came with two acres of land. [1] Gardening [ edit ]