Although I knew the name Margery Fish I didnt really realise how significant a character she was until I heard Catherine Horwood talk about her in one of the Gardens Trusts on-line lectures earlier this year.  Catherine recommended Margery’s first book – We Made a Garden published in 1956 – as a good starting point for understanding how and why she had such influence.   John Sales, the former head of gardens at the National Trust  was even more emphatic, arguing  as early as 1980 that “in the development of gardening in the second half of the twentieth century no garden has yet had greater effect” than her garden at East Lambrook in Somerset. In 1992 it was listed by English Heritage as Garde 1, ie as being of international significance. 

A second-hand copy was duly ordered and was read in just two short sittings. It’s an easy read, with amusing anecdotes and insightful – and honest – comments on the whole process of creating- and maintaining-  a garden, especially when you disagree strongly with your dogmatic partner!

But more than that, while most gardening books tell us how to prune or sow We Made a Garden gives a fascinating insight into  the marriage of Margery and Walter Fish… which is perhaps why this post is called A Gardener’s Revenge?

Margery began writing We Made a Garden after her husband Walter died in 1947, and her initial idea was to call it Gardening with Walter in his honour. On seeing the manuscript her publisher said  “too much Walter and not enough gardening”. In fact in the revised version there’s still plenty of Walter and  the book’s success is  as much about their different personalities and how she coped with  their serious differences about gardening styles as garden making itself.  She probably wouldn’t have ventured to write it while he was alive, because its full of all the things she wanted to do differently but couldn’t or didn’t dare do then.  She never disparages his memory but as you will see instead just reverses many of his decisions, and you can almost see her smiling as she tells you she’s done so. No wonder a  later commentator suggested Margery should have called the book A Gardeners Revenge!

As her nephew recalled in the forward to a later edition of the book “strange as it may seem, Margery Fish took no interest whatsoever in gardening until she was in her late 40s, but, at the time of her death at the age of 76 in March 1969 she occupied a unique position in the gardening world…” How on earth did she achieve so much in so little time?

Lots has been written about Margery Fish  and her reinvention of the cottage garden style, and I don’t want to repeat too much of that – but as usual there’s a list of further reading at the end of this post.  Nor do I want to write a guided tour of the garden at East Lambrook, instead I want to let her tell the story of how it came into being so you get a sense of what she must have been like, and what she had to put up with in Walter.  In another post soon, given that she died in 1968, I’m going to try and  put her achievements  into a wider historical context.

Let me begin the story in her own words: “when, in 1937, my husband decided there was a likelihood of war, and we made up our minds to buy a house in the country, all our friends thought we’d choose a respectable house in good repair complete with garden, all nicely laid out and ready to walk into. And when, instead, we chose a poor battered old house that had to be gutted to be livable, and a wilderness instead of a garden, they were really sorry for us. They were particularly sympathetic about the garden… How would two Londoners go about the job of creating a garden from a farm yard and a rubbish heap? I have never regretted our foolhardiness. Of course, we made mistakes, endless mistakes, but at least they were our own, just as the garden was our own.”

So who was Margery Fish? She was born in 1892 at Stamford Hill in London, and after the  Friends’ School in Saffron Walden where she was  head girl, she went to secretarial college and then on to work for Associated Newspapers. There she became p.a. to the owner, Lord Northcliffe, before becoming  secretary to six successive editors of the  Daily Mail. The last of these was Walter Fish, nearly 20 years her senior, and  in 1933, three years after he retired,  they married.  All this time she was also writing freelance  articles and reviewing books but she was not really interested in gardening.

They went house hunting and one September day in 1937  saw East Lambrook Manor, near South Petherton in Somerset. Originally constructed in the 15thc as an open hall-house it was later modified  and extended  several times, even at one point being converted into two cottages. It is now listed at Grade 2*, but then was in a parlous state. Margery recalled “the long roof was patched with corrugated iron, the little front garden was a jungle of rusty old laurels and inside an overpowering smell of creosote fought with a dank, grave-like smell of an unlived-in house.”  Unsurprinsgingly   “Walter refused to go further than the hall” and dismissed it out of hand saying “full of dry rot…Not at any price.”  That was typical Walter.  Their search continued without success until that November they chanced by East Lambrook again. By then some basic repair work had been done and  “that day I got Walter further than the flagged passage,” After looking around  they changed their minds: “we had come home.”

They bought it, despite a bad surveyors report, with the 2 acre garden for  the princely sum of £1000.  For the next two years they paid short visits while building work was carried out, turning a blind eye to “the derelict waste that was to  be the garden.” Margery remembered “frenziedly pulled up groundsel for as long as I was allowed.” She had obviously already got the gardening bug because  ” it worried me to go off and leave tracts of outsize groundsel going to seed with prodigal abandon.”

Eventually the work was finished and  then “all the time we were clearing and cleaning in odd moments, working our way through the tangle of brambles and elders and laurels, and thinking all the time what we would do with our little plot. We both knew it had to be tackled as a whole with a definite design for the whole complete garden.” But it was wartime  and Walter became adviser to the Press and Censorship Bureau assisted by Margery.  During this time  “our ideas smouldered and simmered.” There is incidentally absolutely no mention of consulting any gardening books or at this time seeking professional advice.

Later, with the war over, they could really get to grips with the garden. At first it was clearance, some hard landscaping  and basic laying out. Serious planting came later. Behind the house it was divided  into two tiny plots with walls and small patches of grass, one for each of the former cottages. Another wall divided the house  from the barton, the local name for the yard in front of the outbuildings and between the house and the orchard.  “Beneath all these walls” Margery noted  “someone had amused himself by making banks and sticking in stones vertically, like almonds in a trifle…. I have never discovered the reason for these jagged walls and I don’t think they’re at all attractive.” The walls had to go. All the stones were piled up for future use, but you can almost hear her annoyance when she said “they were quite a problem, those piles of stones, as they were moved from place to place, as we dealt with the ground where they were piled. I could not see how we could ever use them all.” But use them they did.

 

However one further wall remained. It was a high one that separated them from the road and had great scope for planting between the stones. “Walter suggested I could get busy on top of the wall while we decided what to do with the rest of the garden.”  Perhaps this was his way of trying to keep her occupied while he got on with the “real’ job of designing the rest of garden.  If so, his plan didn’t work terribly well.

We Made a Garden conjures up a wonderful image of her working on the wall.   After planting she would return regularly to water the plants. This was usually after dinner clambering over heaps of stones to reach the top   and “those were the days when one donned a long dress and satin slippers for this social occasion – which one didn’t have to cook. I can’t think how I avoided turning an ankle as I had to clutch my skirt with one hand and use the other for the watering can while the stones rocked and tipped under my weight.” I wish there was photo of that – although the one of her pruning in a two piece suit gives a clue – but sadly there aren’t many images of her as she was camera shy.

Having cleared the walls the next job was to clear the barton. This was “a job that would frighten most people, but not Walter.”  Having taken over a derelict former farm myself I can sympathise  with what they found: “old beds, rusty oil stoves, ancient corsets, pots, pans, tins and china, bottles and glass jars”, and much more.   As I said Walter was a very determined man and while much rubbish could be  burnt on a semi-permanent bonfire in the barton  he decided, there being no recycling centres, the rest had to be  buried wherever there was an odd corner around the site. Margery argued to keep the bonfire but was overruled but she admits that “Walter was very wise in being so firm with me. The only way to get jobs done is to be ruthless and definite.”  Unfortunately Walter was not that wise about his rubbish disposal methods because she said later, “as I have put more land into cultivation I have run into quite a number of these caches, and have decided it really does not pay to take shortcuts.”  That lesson served her well  later when. she ran the garden on her own.

To make matters worse there was a wall between the barton and the orchard which Walter suggested would make a good site for a rock garden. In fact he wasn’t actually terribly interested in rockery plants – or indeed any of the smaller plants that Margery cherished  – and “It was only after I had given my enthusiastic agreement that I discovered he wanted some way of disposing of the bigger rubbish that couldn’t be buried. So all the oil stoves, bits of bedsteads, lumps of iron, rolls of wire netting were distributed against the walls and the rest of the job was handed over to me.” One of the things I really love about her work is that she is very quick to admit making mistakes and making this rock garden was a early example of that.

The couple employed a garden boy to help with heavy work  and he and Margery covered all the rubbish that Walter insisted on interring and then “ransacked the heaps of stones for the nicest looking specimens”  to build the rockery. Neither she nor the garden boy had ever done anything like that before and they constructed what they thought were “two very fine gardens” until, that is, some visitors appeared.  One of them, Margery  says, was “an expert gardener and she didn’t get further than the first rock garden. I thought she was filled with admiration for my handiwork and was waiting for the applause.”  But exactly the opposite – the visitor was plucking up the courage to tell her it was a disaster. The stones were all laid at the wrong angle and instead of tipping inwards to make pockets of soil which would hold the rain,  they  were tilted outwards so the first heavy shower would see most of the soil washed away. The whole thing had to be rebuilt from scratch. Luckily she had a cousin who relaid  the stones “to give the effect of level strata of outcrop, something I would never of dreamed of and I’ve never cease to admire.”

Once again, she learnt very quickly from her mistakes and used up many of the stones  they had cleared by making dry stone walls tucking alpine plants into every available crevice. While “Walter was very pleased with our first wall and egged me on to make others, he was less enthusiastic as time went on as he thought I was spending too much time poking ‘belly-crawlers into rat-holes’ instead of doing jobs he thought more important. ”

As she tells the early history of East Lambrook her evolving garden philosophy begins to show through.  In clearing the space immediately behind the house “we wanted it to be as simple as possible, as much grass as we could get and a generous drive to the old Malthouse which we were using as a garage.… We knew that the bigger the lawn the more spacious would be our garden. Just as a plain carpet pushes out the walls and makes a room bigger so a wide stretch of uninterrupted grass gives a feeling of space and restless. Why, oh! why, will people cut up the lawns and fill them with horrid little beds?”   Walter was “rabid on this subject…  He liked breadth and generosity and a feeling of spaciousness in the garden as well as the house, and the elimination of all unnecessary detail.”

However, this could be taken to extremes. So when the lawn was taken up to the wall  “I was grudgingly allowed a narrow bed in which to plant a few perennials and the climbers that were to close the wall, but I was warned it was not to approach too much on the precious green grass.” This lawn took several weeks to make but in the process, once again,  “we made all the mistakes imaginable because we were in such a hurry to get the job done.”

While its easy to  think  Walter was a just a self-opinionated male chauvinist Marjorie does admit that sometimes he was right. “I cannot stress too much the importance of well cut grass, good paths and well trimmed hedges. With wifely stubbornness I’m 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 now know he was right when he said that the four essentials of a good garden are perfect lawns, paths, hedges and walls. No matter how beautiful they are, if the surroundings are unkempt, the flowers would give no pleasure whereas one could have a perfectly good and satisfying garden without any flowers at all. I used to argue this point most heatedly but I have come to agree with him wholeheartedly.”

Another  subject on which Walter had very strong views were paths. She had “many lectures on how to retrieve perfection. He felt there was nothing to beat a good gravel path and a good gravel path was hard so that nothing would spoil the surface and weeds would find no foothold.” The  construction of the drive is described in great detail and it must have been excruciatingly hard work.   After digging down and levelling, in went a layer of rubble “then the garden boy rolled, Walter rammed and I sprinkled with a watering can. We rolled and rammed, rammed and rolled until the surface was as firm and level as a billiard table.” Next came a  layer of ashes and clinker  and “again we rolled and  watered over and over again until it was smooth and firm.” Finally came a thick layer of gravel but even after all these preparations  “every time we had heavy rain the drive had to be rolled… and every time we had a party the roller had to come out into action again”. Margery  patiently pointed out gravel paths “require far more attention the most people can possibly give them” and her revenge came later because “after Walters death I gave up the unequal struggle.”

Other paths around the garden were paving stones or sometimes crazy paving laid  on deep foundations. As you can imagine Walter had strong ideas about how this should be done.  He would wait until the grouting had almost set and then scoop out a small amount so the outline of each stone was clearly defined and he “used to stand over the men laying the paving and see that they did this.”  Margery  would have “preferred to fill our cracks with a mixture of sand and fine soil so that tiny green plants would creep all along the stones but this what is one thing Walter would not have at any price.”

You can guess what happened after he died and almost sense her smile. “A lot of the Somerset cement has become loosened, some of it helped I admit by a crowbar, and now I have little plants creeping and crawling in and out of nearly every crevice… They don’t make as much work as Walter always prophesied they would.”

Having more than reached my self-imposed word limit, with much more to say, I’ll carry on next week but if you can’t wait for more information then We Made a Garden is available on-line, as is Timothy Clark’s Margery Fish’s Country Gardening, [1989] The gardens at East Lambrook are open to the public and their website has more information, although very few historic photos.