We Made a Garden

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It made me incredibly sad that her husband’s strong opinions on gardening clashed so much with her own.

We Made a Garden by Margery Fish: Books - AbeBooks We Made a Garden by Margery Fish: Books - AbeBooks

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. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged.Delightful read on the creation from scratch of an English Garden on the site of an old farm house and surrounding farm yard/barton combining her husband's 4 elements of a garden: lawn, walls, paths, hedges and her love of flowers, especially in every season possible. These included Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire, the garden designer Nancy Lindsay, and the Somerset neighbour Violet Clive of Brympton d'Evercy, an equally passionate gardener. Owner Mike receives the odd barbed comment from Fish fans who have spied a modern plant introduction, and he can be forgiven for occasionally railing against the mistress of cottage gardening.

We Made a Garden (Royal Horticultural Society Classic Garden We Made a Garden (Royal Horticultural Society Classic Garden

It is written in a lovely informal style discussing her successes and failures as she created her garden. I am a novice gardener and the vast array of latin names for plants that I don't recognize was not really helpful to my objective.Geranium pratense, with its fetching violet flowers, is but one of the useful hardy geraniums Fish liked to grow on account of their robust habits. Lonicera nitida hedges (clipped by Stainer every two weeks during the growing season) and Lawson’s cypress ‘Fletcheri’ ( Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Fletcheri’) pillars introduce what Fish described as a note of restraint in contrast to the floral abundance. 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. 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 turned to gardening when she was in her mid-forties and went on to develop the whole concept of a cottage garden.