We Made a Garden

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Having got our house we then had to give it up again so that it could be made habitable. For many months it was in the hands of the builders and all we could do was to pay hurried visits to see how things were going, and turn our eyes from the derelict waste that was to be the garden. Sometimes I escaped from the consultations for brief moments and frenziedly pulled up groundsel for as long as I was allowed. Walter never wanted to stay a moment longer than business required and it worried me to go off and leave tracts of outsize groundsel going to seed with prodigal abandon. My few snatched efforts made very little impression on the wilderness, but they made me feel better. 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. 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.

You can't make a garden in a hurry, particularly one belonging to an old house. House and garden must look as if they had grown up together and the only way to do this is to live in the house, get the feel of it, and then by degrees the idea of the garden will grow. Margery Townsend left secretarial college in 1911 with glowing references, at a time when it was still rare for a middle class girl to either want or have the opportunity to follow a career, Margery entered the world of Fleet Street. She immediately showed great talent and worked diligently and zealously in everything she did and was soon promoted to work for the Editor of the Daily Mail, Tommy Marlowe. Here, for the first time she also found herself working for the newspaper’s founder, Lord Northcliffe, known to his staff as ‘The Chief’. He was a dictator who ruled his staff through fear and friendliness, able to reward one minute and punish the next. However, Margery remained loyal to his memory and indeed, he instilled in her the importance of aiming for the highest standards at whatever she embarked upon. In a world where women had still not been given the vote, Lord Northcliffe, showed Margery that regardless of their sex, it was the ability of his staff to work hard and show talent that would lead to their success. 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. 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...

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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. 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. 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: Margery Fish turned to gardening when she was in her mid-forties and went on to develop the whole concept of a cottage garden. She had a love of flowers coupled with a passion for nature and made an intensive research into the traditionally grown plants with which cottage gardens in Britain were once so densely planted. 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]

Although we have seen each other for years, it is strange how little time we have ever had to talk. That is why it was so jolly to be able to talk to you the other evening apart from business concerns.’ Two years later, on the 2nd March 1933, they were married. 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. 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. This is now one of the most important books on gardening ever written. A beautiful and timeless book on creating a garden. We were still hunting in November when our way took us very near the old house so summarily dismissed in September, so we turned down the lane which said "East Lambrook one mile," just to see what had been happening during those three months. 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.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. 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.)