We Made a Garden

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Fish’s aspiration to cultivate that most precious and slow-growing quality—the fundamental character of a good garden. Her prose is practical rather than lyrical, and you probably should enjoy gardening to enjoy this book. As another reviewer noted, in the words of LP Hartley, "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," and perhaps it is those glimpses into the domestic life of a far off land that compelled me to keep going: a lady in her long dinner dress and satin slippers perched precariously, balanced with a watering can to water the tops of her walls where trails of greenery fall. Intrigued and excited, I ran to a neighbour’s, borrowed a sledgehammer and, Thor-like, pounded a hole through the only wall, in an under-stair cupboard, which could possibly conceal a staircase. It made me incredibly sad that her husband’s strong opinions on gardening clashed so much with her own.

At the time of purchase, I didn’t know that almost opposite, hidden in the lightly wooded valley below, down a long wooded driveway lay the Priory.And yet, the author brings up many large scale aspects of garden design I had not considered --ambitious construction of walls and paths, and creative cottage style gardening with trailing plants overlaying paths and use of rocks and placing creeping rock plants and thymes in tiny crevices. This is a charming little book by Margery Fish, offering anecdotal history of the choosing and planting of a home garden in England. Gardening books are always wonderful and, as ever, I came away with notes of new plants to try and new techniques. We knocked out the bricked-up window and dug out clay to a further depth of twelve inches, passing it out through the window to a waiting skip.

The Rayburn heated the kitchen and most of the downstairs, gave us scalding hot water, cooked most of our food and warmed our buns. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.I have put in a few dozen irises and both the thymes and sages seem to have survived recent planting. As others have said before, this book reveals not just the story of making a garden but also a somewhat disturbing portrait of a seemingly unbalanced marriage.

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