The Somerset house that brought 'jungle gardening' to the English

Lovers of Margery Fish’s famous garden at East Lambrook, Somerset, will be glad to know that it is once again in safe hands. It has passed through many owners since the great gardening writer died in 1969 and the new custodians Andrew and Alison Johnson moved in last May after fears that the house might be sold and the garden lost. The excellent news is that they are not only experienced and knowledgeable gardeners, but thrilled to be taking on such an important and historic masterpiece.

Andrew and Alison are originally from Cheshire, but lived for 30 years in Seattle, where they prospered. The garden they made there was one of 10 chosen for a recent book about modern American gardens and has been the subject of many articles and blogs. On their return to England, they sought a house where they could develop their gardening skills further. They have already made immense inroads into clearing and restoring what they found on their arrival at East Lambrook. They give heartfelt thanks to all the previous owners who strove to keep alive the memory of Fish, her garden and her plants.

It is sometimes said that Fish’s first and best-known gardening book, We Made a Garden (1956), is an account of her battles with her husband, Walter, a retired journalist, about the design and planting of their garden. That rather misses the point. The book is exactly what it set out to be — an account of how they made their garden at East Lambrook and it was written, rather reflectively, during her years of widowhood. She explains what they did and why they did it, their successes and their failures and how they retrieved the garden from their many mistakes, learning all the time.

The tone is intimate and personal; her conversational style is one of the book’s great strengths and accounts for much of its popularity. There is no trace of grandiloquence or even of immaculate grammar. It reads as if she is sitting opposite you at the kitchen table, drinking tea and telling you of all the ups and downs of how she and Walter made and maintained the garden. The success of We Made a Garden led to another seven books, all eagerly studied and enjoyed by her disciples.

Walter and Margery Fish moved to Somerset in 1937. The modest manor house was built of beautiful Ham stone and dates back to the 15th century. As for the garden, Fish always said that they bought a wilderness — ‘friends were really sorry for us’.

However, she was so smitten by the variegated sycamore Acer pseudoplatanus f. variegatum ‘Leopoldii’ on the main lawn that she said she would have bought the house just for the joy of owning it. It flourishes still today.

Walter insisted on four priorities: perfect lawns, paths, hedges and walls. Margery was more interested in plants, but came to agree with her husband because he saw the garden as a whole, whereas she adored the details. Nevertheless, structure mattered: she is remembered for declaring ‘if I ever hear of a good garden, I visit it in winter and, if I like it, return in the summer’. Elsewhere, she wrote: ‘No matter how beautiful they are, if the surroundings are unkempt, the flowers would give no pleasure whereas one could have a perfectly good and satisfying garden without any flowers at all.’

Fish loved the traditional plants with which cottage gardens in Britain were once so densely planted and encouraged her readers to ‘cherish the simple flowers that brightened [them] for so many years’. She sought a superabundance of flowers at every season. Evergreens included her own signature spurge Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii ‘Lambrook Gold.’ Bulbs naturalised everywhere, especially snowdrops, daffodils and Tulipa sprengeri. Cyclamen are also very much at home and she adored violets and primroses. It was mainly due to her love of plants that she developed the garden in the old cottage-gardening style.

Fish also described her informal planting style as ‘jungle gardening’ and the exuberant tangled growth of plants in much of her garden, especially in late summer, was a quality that she valued highly. Her garden was designed to offer an infinity of habitats — each of them an opportunity. There was no place for herbaceous borders or the grand style of previous generations. Nor did she hanker for the formal gradation of colours that Gertrude Jekyll had popularised for 50 years. What she created was a middle-class interpretation of an English cottage garden, perfectly in keeping with the house.

All the owners since Fish have sought to conserve the garden’s structure and cherish her plants. First was her nephew Henry Boyd-Carpenter, followed by his parents, until his father died in 1984. Andrew Norton bought the house in 1985 and did much to restore the garden, as well as developing a National Collection of Geranium species and cultivars. Then it passed to Robert and Marianne Williams, who sold it in turn to Gail and Mike Werkmeister in 2008. Few gardens are so well documented — what grew best and where it flourished, although many of the original plants are no longer available, which means that substitutes must be found that Fish would have endorsed if she were alive today.

The Werkmeisters were excellent custodians. An example of their thoughtful management was the planting of a young handkerchief tree in the centre of the white garden — the form called Davidia involucrata ‘Sonoma’, which flowers as a young plant. They also began a tradition of opening the garden in February for a Snowdrop Festival.

Fish liked flowers in winter, especially green-marked snowdrops and double forms, notably Galanthus ‘Ophelia’, that open even in dim light. She also loved G. ‘Magnet’, with its long pedicels and dancing flowers. The varieties that she planted have cross-pollinated and seeded around so that good new cultivars turn up all the time. Examples with Lambrook names include G. plicatus ‘Lambrook Greensleeves’, G. ‘Sir Henry B-C’, G. plicatus ‘Walter Fish’ and, above all, G. nivalis ‘Margery Fish’. Some 10 or 12 further plant cultivars are named after her or her garden. Perhaps the best known and remembered today are Artemisia absinthium ‘Lambrook Silver’ and Polemonium ‘Lambrook Mauve’, although Penstemon ‘Margery Fish’ still has an AGM from the RHS.

When Gail died in 2022, her husband decided to downsize and, after many months without a sale, rather gave up hope of finding a buyer to whom he could confidently pass on the baton of responsibility for this super-important garden, until the arrival of Andrew and Alison, who set to work on the gardens as soon as they moved in — their furniture had yet to arrive from Seattle. They are acutely aware of the importance of the garden and its status both nationally and internationally. Intending to restore it as faithfully as possible, they have spoken to many old friends of the garden and read everything they can about it.

The original structure — the walls, the paving and the paths (now nicely re-gravelled) — is intact, but much of the garden is overgrown. The evergreen lonicera hedge (now known as Lonicera ligustrina var. yunnanensis) has, for example, been allowed to grow and thicken until it completely obliterated Fish’s herb garden, which the Johnsons are restoring. The Green Garden was so overgrown that the new owners have left a brown cut-off bramble stem high overhead to remind themselves of the task that faced them on arrival. Here, as throughout the garden, much emphasis is placed on the value of evergreen trees and shrubs for young-round structure.

The Johnsons have added interesting new plants to fill the recovered space, including a variegated form of Phormium tenax and a handsome young loquat Eriobotrya japonica. They are also planting new fruit trees in the orchard, now only a lawn; first to be added were a greengage and the yellow damson known as ‘Shepherd’s Bullace’.

The Johnsons have been greatly encouraged by past owners and by people who have continued to grow plants that have been lost to the garden. Their greatest help has been Mark Stainer, who started as a gardener at East Lambrook at the age of 15 in 1974 and has worked there ever since — and they are propagating as many ‘original’ Margery Fish plants as possible for sale to visitors.

East Lambrook is open to visitors. See the East Lambrook website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.