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. After her death in 1969, the garden became neglected, but happily has been carefully restored since 1985 and now remains a living monument to a great lady, enjoying visitors from all over the world. The Elizabethan manor built of Ham stone, stands amongst a haven of horticultural interest with ambling paths and natural gullies with some structure given using pollarded willows and a curving avenue of domed Chamaecyparis. 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. Margery Fish encouraged her readers to ‘cherish the simple flowers that brightened our cottage gardens for so many years.’ She created the now famous garden at East Lambrook Manor from 1938, which remains a monument to her. The abundant style of planting reflected her interest in plants and this coupled with her extensive knowledge of soils and situations as to which suited each plant, made her garden very popular in the 1950’s and 60’s. 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]

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. Yes, they were part of a campaign, and the purpose of the campaign was not to teach her to garden properly (which was not in his gift), but to prevent her from doing so and thereby leaving him behind I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy in Liverpool. I have been there for nearly a week and had I known you were there, I would have seen you. It is difficult to find appointments just now, but yours is an exceptional case. You crossed the Atlantic when the submarines were at their worst and I have always given special treatment to those of my staff who took the risk. I will do my utmost. Meanwhile please come and see me tomorrow, Tuesday morning at 11.30 at No 1 Carlton Gardens. Quite a lot had happened. The front garden had been cleared of its laurels and the house looked much better. Old tiles had replaced the corrugated iron on the roof, and inside the walls had been washed with cream and the woodwork with glossy paint.That day I got Walter further than the flagged passage, and we explored the old bakehouse, with its enormous inglenook and open fireplace, low beamed ceiling and stone floor, and a gay little parlour beyond. On the other side was another large room with stone floor and an even bigger fireplace, and at the far end a lovely room with wonderful panelling. We both knew that our search had ended, we had come home.

The house was long and low, in the shape of an L, built of honey-coloured Somerset stone. At one time it must have been thatched but, unfortunately, that had been discarded long ago and old red tiles used instead. It stood right in the middle of a little Somerset village, and made the corner where a very minor road turned off from the main street. There was only a narrow strip of garden in front, and not very much behind, but we bought an orchard and outbuildings beyond so that we had about two acres in all. A high stone wall screened us from the village street, and there was a cottage and another orchard on the other side. 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. 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.

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All the titles have been reprinted in various forms at various times. Several have been translated into German, Dutch, Italian and other languages. 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. 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] 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 ]

David St John Thomas: Journey through Britain... (London: Frances Lincoln, 2004), pp. 343–44. Retrieved 2 November 2012.J'ai reconnu bien des conseils donnés oralement par une vieille amie d'origine anglaise, ainsi que de nombreuses plantes que Nicole avait dans son jardin, comme les Geranium vivaces, que j'ai encore chez moi, mis en couvre-sol sur la plupart des parterres. 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] naturally-as the weather. Nor shall I forget Walter's indignation with the report when it did come in. The house, while sound in wind and limb, was described as being of "no character." We didn't think then that it had anything but character, rather sinister perhaps, but definitely character. Since then I have discovered that the house has a kindly disposition; I never come home without feeling I am welcome. The cottage garden created by the renowned 20th-century plantswoman and gardening writer Margery Fish. 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 ]

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.

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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. Margery Fish developed a style of gardening which was in tune with the times: the Second World War had made labour scarce and expensive and it was no longer a reality to have paid teams of gardeners. Gardens had to change. While the cottage garden style was already apparent at Hidcote and Sissinghurst, these were gardens that still required paid gardeners. What Mrs Fish created at East Lambrook Manor, was a grand cottage garden on a domestic scale, she wrote, “It is pleasant to know each one of your plants intimately because you have chosen and planted every one of them.” For the first time a garden had been created to which anyone could relate. It was an ‘approachable’ garden and through her many books and articles, Margery managed to change gardening from a pastime of the wealthy to a passion for the whole population.