Margery Fish

[1] The garden she created, at East Lambrook Manor in Somerset, has Grade I listed status and remains open to the public.

[2] She was educated at the Friends School Saffron Walden and at a secretarial college, before spending twenty years working in Fleet Street, initially with countryside magazines and then with Associated Newspapers.

There she accompanied Lord Northcliffe on a war mission to the United States in 1916, and then worked as secretary to six successive editors of the Daily Mail, the last of whom, the widower Walter Fish, she married on 2 March 1933, three years after his retirement.

The house, which was designated a Grade II* listed building in 1959,[3] was built of Somerset hamstone in the 15th and 16th centuries and came with two acres of land.

By the late 1950s, East Lambrook garden was being opened to the public for charity and had a small plant nursery attached to it.

What Mrs Fish created at East Lambrook Manor, was a grand cottage garden on a domestic scale.

She squeezed her writing around working 18-hour days on developing and maintaining the garden, even doing dry stone walling and path-laying herself.

"[12] Margery Fish died in South Petherton Hospital, Somerset, on 24 March 1969, leaving her house and garden to a nephew, Henry Boyd-Carpenter.

[1] They were sold in 1985, but the next owners, Andrew and Dodo Norton, maintained the garden and nursery and continued to develop the legacy of Margery Fish, before handing over to the Williams family in 1999.

However, Robert completed a Royal Horticultural College course, and they were soon employing 28 staff, with a tearoom, shop and art gallery.