When Margery's voice emerges on its own, questioning or ignoring Walter's pronouncements, the book is at its most endearing. From Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties by Rachel Cooke Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Cooke.

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. 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. Clearly none of us are ever going to achieve a Margery sized garden or house without a lottery win, but you can still dream! Now, though, they were back: the roses and the dahlias, the geraniums and the begonias—and the brighter, the better. Margery went on to record their battle for control in her 1956 book, We Made A Garden; with its passive aggressive tone, it is as much about their marriage as the garden, yet it is still a horticultural classic to be read and re-read.The beautiful and timeless We Made a Garden recounts the trials and tribulations, successes and failures, of her venture with ease and humor--from choosing the most suitable hyssop for the terraced garden to battling with her husband on the best approach. Margery Townshend was born on 5 August 1892 at 16 Eastbank, Stamford Hill, now part of the London Borough of Hackney, as the second of the four daughters of Ernest Townshend (died 1926), a commercial traveller in tea, and his wife Florence Harriet, née Buttfield (died 1920). That is why it was so jolly to be able to talk to you the other evening apart from business concerns. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

Writing such a book wasn’t a betrayal, exactly, but it was certainly an act of domestic insurrection, albeit a postdated one—and she must have worried, just a little, about how it would be received (our own, more confessional age takes memoir in its stride). While the cottage garden style was already apparent at Hidcote and Sissinghurst, these were gardens that still required paid gardeners.

Several snowdrop varieties discovered in the "ditch garden" at Lambrook since Margery Fish's death have been named and described.