We Made a Garden Book

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of its original publication, Margery Fish's classic gardening memoir has been published in the United States for the first time. Fish and her husband Walter, a former editor of the Daily Mail, bought a dilapidated house and two acres of limey clay in Somerset in 1937, fearing the onset of war. For the next two decades, they cultivated, pruned, and watered, with Walter providing the direction and the sense of order and Margery the flowers, the unstructured flora, and the wry observations. As in all of the best gardening books, Fish's memoir leavens technical information on gardening with memory and reflection. The book is above all the story of a marriage within the story of a landscape. Walter's lectures on the importance of structure, the distant war, the hardships of postwar England, come through slightly muted, like the outlines of buildings seen through dense foliage.

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. Margery Fish recounts the trails and tribulations, successes and failures, of her venture with ease and humour. Her book will interest all those who are planning gardens for themselves, as well as those who delight in cottage garden plants. Topics covered are colourful and diverse, ranging from the most suitable hyssop for the terraced garden through composting, hedges, making paths to the best time to lift and replant tulip bulbs. Her good sense, practical knowledge and imaginative ideas will encourage and inspire gardeners everywhere. Graham Rice, the widely published gardening author and the London Evening Standard gardening correspondent, has reviewed the plant names in the original text, providing a plant-name section at the back of the book. This provides a way of identifying current plants from their old Latin names.