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Posted 20 hours ago

We Made a Garden

£9.9£99Clearance
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About this deal

They seem to have spent a lot of time building drystone walls, terraces and courtyards all over the garden, which sadly (perhaps) is not an option for most of us, and therefore not so interesting. After mulling over which long-distance path to walk for my 2017 hiking holiday, I decided to revisit my first love, The Ridgeway. I am always weak on watering and Margery's habit of using a syringe to water new wall plants, stuffed into a crevice and then surrounded by moss is impressive and salutary.

She is writing this book after his death and can barely repress her delight at finally being able to plant certain things he had always forbidden her.

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. I had to pull out my phone so many times to Google them to get an idea of how they looked; a visual glossary of some sort would be a nice addition. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Her prose is practical rather than lyrical, and you probably should enjoy gardening to enjoy this book. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.

All used books might have various degrees of writing, highliting and wear and tear and possibly be an ex-library with the usual stickers and stamps. It’s one of a (not very) regular series of posts about gardens and houses we’ve owned over the years. I particularly loved hearing about the areas where they failed or struggled – it’s always heartening to know this doesn’t just happen to you.

This might have been first published in the fifties but the fact its still available is testimony to how good it is. 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. She’d complained about it, apparently, to no avail but we soon discovered the source and it was easy enough to fix – had the unpleasant London Company bothered to help their elderly, sickly tenant.

The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. I can well imagine the tensions between two people trying to make a garden with competing visions for it. Almost twenty years later, in 1956, Walter’s wife looked back and chronicled what they did with their two acre plot in the classic gardening book We Made a Garden by Margery Fish. Well, it wasn't much help as a source of practical inspiration, to be honest, but I enjoyed basking in the warmth of her love for all things green, anyway, and that was a kind of inspiration to take more care of the poor neglected patch of muck.

Delightful read on the creation from scratch of an English Garden on the site of an old farm house and surrounding farm yard/barton combining her husband's 4 elements of a garden: lawn, walls, paths, hedges and her love of flowers, especially in every season possible. I whacked at the hole until we could squeeze through and venture down the steps into a large brick-floored cellar – with, sure enough, a bricked-up window.

I also noticed how overbearing her husband was, and how she enjoyed doing things her own way later on when she gardened by herself. Sometimes in the summer my heart softens when I see its really pretty flat pink rosettes, but most of the time it is war.The previous owner grew her vegetables here and, for decades, she’d dug in compost and she’d dug in manure.

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