Her approach to gardening changed everything.
et outside of horticultural circles, Margery Fish doesn’t share the same level of fame as female contemporaries Vita Sackville-West and Beth Chatto. But then Vita was immortalised by Virginia Woolf, and Beth was a ten-time Chelsea Gold Medal-winner. That other legend Gertrude Jekyll had reached the end of her career before Margery even got started. It seems like a baton might have been passed between them, but Gertrude’s pioneering English gardens – borders of herbaceous perennials and unity between house and garden – were for the pleasure of affluent countryside clients. Margery’s ‘modest and unpretentious’ style of planting was for herself, and later, it
