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Books : We Made a Garden (Modern Library Gardening)

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by: Margery Fish

 : We Made a Garden (Modern Library Gardening)

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 635.90942389
EAN: 9780375759475
ISBN: 0375759476
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: February 19, 2002
Publisher: Modern Library
Release Date: February 19, 2002
Studio: Modern Library
Sales Rank: 780700




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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
First published in Britain in 1956 and never before available in America, We Made a Garden is the classic story of a unique and enduring English country garden. One of Britain’s most esteemed gardening writers recounts how she and her husband set about creating an exemplary cottage garden from unpromising beginnings on the site of the former farmyard and rubbish heap that surround their newly purchased home in the countryside of Somerset, England. Each imbued with a strong set of horticultural opinions and passions, Mr. and Mrs. Fish negotiate the terrain of their garden, by turns separately and together, often with humorous collisions. From the secret to cultivating the smoothest lawn to the art of lifting and replanting tulip bulbs to the landscaping possibilities of evergreens, the diverse elements of successful gardening—and delightful writing—are bound together by Mr. and Mrs. Fish’s aspiration to cultivate that most precious and slow-growing quality—the fundamental character of a good garden.

Amazon.com Review:
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.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating:  out of 5 stars

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Great Garden, Great Book, Not So Great Marriage
Margery Fish must have loved her Walter very, very much to have put up with him all those years. Her account of the garden they made despite each other is one of the great triumphs of the "garden memoir" genre, and vastly more interesting than most such works.

The book is haunted by the presence of Walter, and his likes and dislikes, and right ways and wrong ways to do anything. You can't help but feel Mrs Fish must have breathed the world's biggest sigh of relief at his passing, since ... Read More



Rating: 2 out of 5 stars - A Slightly Depressing Weed Of A Book
I wanted to like this book. I just finished the Dudley Warner Book, in the same classic gardening series, which I had savored like a good box of chocolates, rationing out a few pages, each day. But this one--oddly enough--depressed me slightly. It has a sad subplot. You have this stiff upper lip British Matron, who was married to Walter, who oppressed every good idea she had for their garden. She basically isn't able to implement her visions until he dies. But once he's dead you realize, in her ... Read More



Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Garden story....
WE MADE A GARDEN is a lovely little book by Margery Fish, an "elderly" English lady who with her husband (he who must be obeyed or cleverly deceived it seems) moved to a country manor and converted the mostly lawn areas into gardens of shrubs, flowers, and herbs. First published in the U.K. in the 1950s, the book has been republished as part of the `Modern Library Garden Series' edited by Michael Pollan.

Fish's little book will be considered a gem by experienced gardeners who can picture the ... Read More



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