Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Walter died on 21 December 1947 of a heart attack, the Sunday newspaper he had been reading only a few minutes earlier still beside him. A part of Margery had long been expecting this, but nevertheless she found herself in a state of shock. Thanks to the fact that he had always been so ‘vigorous in mind’, he had never seemed his age to her (he was seventy-three). Longevity ran in his family; neither of them had taken his heart condition seriously. ‘I found it hard to believe that the scattering of a few ashes in a windswept [crematorium] garden in Weymouth one wintry morning could be the end of such an outstanding figure,’ she wrote later, in notes for the biography of Walter that she tried three times to write. ‘He was so different from the ordinary run of people that I could not believe anything so ordinary as death could happen to him.’

  All the same, she did not grieve for long. It was Christmas time and she was determined that nothing ruin the holiday for her nephew Henry, to whom she was devoted. (Henry’s mother was her youngest sister, Nina; she and Margery spoke every day at 6 p.m.). As ever she was determined to be practical, to soldier on just as Walter would have done. ‘Self-reliance was the key note of his character,’ she wrote. ‘Once, for fun, he had a coat of arms painted, and for it he chose the words: Trust thyself. Nothing could have illuminated him better. Now I, too, learnt that in the ultimate resort you have to rely on yourself How would she remember Walter? Kindly. Theirs had been a love-hate relationship, but Walter had had his qualities: ‘[They] came out in everything he did, and I shall always be grateful to him for what he taught me.’ The only other fragment of biography that remains is a cryptic list of her first thoughts, and though it reads like a line from T. S. Eliot – ‘women, nice young; jewellery; knew it was something you didn’t do;* kindness to old; stuffy Victorians; devotion to mother; eye for line; dislike of bad fit; let’s go and see, sweetie’ – it makes him sound decent, and surprisingly generous.

  In early January 1948 there was a memorial service for Walter at St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street. A few months later Margery went to Plainfields in New Jersey to see her Buttfield cousins, the first of three trips she would make before 1950. She and Lanning Roper went garden-visiting on his home turf, which was unexpectedly eye-opening,† and she returned to Britain with a new wardrobe – her uncle sent her shopping at his expense, knowing how weary she was of coupons – and a fad for raw bran, a bag of which she would take with her wherever she went. Back at home, many of her friends believed that Margery would now return to London, but to their surprise it seemed that she would not contemplate selling East: ‘It always welcomes me home,’ she said. What did she see when she looked out on Walter’s garden? Did her fingertips tingle? Did she long to get out there and scatter seeds wildly? Perhaps. But if this was how she felt, she did nothing about it. For the next two years the garden remained just as it had been in Walter’s day, as neatly trimmed as his moustache, as tightly buttoned as his waistcoat.

  Nineteen-fifty. As if stirring from a long sleep, Margery now began to make changes. First, the house. Out went the mahogany tallboys, the gilded lamps, the detested French bedroom suite which, to her, had always looked so at odds with its surroundings. In came simpler pieces of oak and elm: gate-legged tables and Windsor chairs. In the dining room she banished silverware, replacing it with pewter, which was polished only rarely. Oil paintings in heavy gilt frames gave way to maps, mirrors, etchings and prints by Corot, an artist she adored. She employed a housekeeper and let out the west wing; her home was too big for one, and having two staircases unsettled her. Finally, she changed the name of the house from Old Manor, East Lambrook to East Lambrook Manor, so it would take up two rather than three lines on her printed letterhead. Always a prolific letter-writer – friends used to joke that her (famously hilarious) letters were so long they took two days to read – it was almost as if she knew that her correspondence was soon to quadruple.

  The garden at East Lambrook: Margery planted the avenue of evergreen ‘Fletcheri’

  (Margery Fish Archive/RHS, Lindley Library.)

  Next, she turned her attention to the garden. She and Walter had laid some fine foundations: a terraced garden for bulbs and shrubs, and the low stone walls for plants that liked to have their roots restricted; a ditch garden for species needing damp and shade (Margery called it the Lido); and an unorthodox rockery for alpines in the form of a series of half moon-shaped steps, which she referred to, mock grandly, as the Colosseum. (She was wary of traditional rockeries: ‘There is nothing more depressing than a few stones rising self-consciously from a suburban lawn.’) Gazing out at all this she realised with mounting excitement that she would be free to concentrate – at last – solely on plants.

  And so it began: the collection that would one day comprise some two thousand varieties. At first she was casual. She banned Walter’s hoe and did all her weeding by hand so she could carefully examine any seedlings. Her favourite tool was her Guernsey hand fork, three-tined with a hickory wood handle bent at an angle of almost eighty degrees to enable tomato growers to lift plants without damaging their roots; it came back into the house with her every evening. This fork had previously belonged to her uncle Marsom Buttfield, aka Uncle Marzipan, another tea broker and a disciple of both the ‘wild gardener’ William Robinson and of Gertrude Jekyll; Marsom, having eschewed the laurels and rhododendrons beloved of most Victorians, had instead planted his carriage drive at Enfield with a double hedge of sweet briar roses and was thus a formative influence on Margery, though she did not grasp this fact until relatively late in life. But she soon realised that it wasn’t going to be enough simply to let things self-seed. She was acquisitive in the best sense of the word. If she admired a plant she longed to have it in as many different forms as possible; and she wanted, too, to save those varieties which were rapidly disappearing. She thought of herself as a soppy, ‘sentimentalist’ gardener. Her two acres would be a safe haven, a place where no plant was ever deemed too small or too insignificant to merit a little tender care.

  Some plants – a very few – she bought from nurseries and catalogues. Most, though, came as cuttings from friends – or strangers, if she happened to spy something lovely billowing over a garden wall. Geraniums, hellebores, rodgersias, scillas, penstemons, irises, ferns, bluebells, cyclamen, silver-leafed plants of all types, hostas, bergenias, snowdrops and primroses: she collected all of these and more (this list is not, I fear, even halfway to being exhaustive). It was, however, the two last that she loved the best. Snowdrops she adored for their ‘aloofness and purity’, and for their plucky earliness which, for her, made winter almost as exciting as late spring; she grew them on the banks of her ditch garden, where they were at eye level and could be properly admired. Primroses she liked for their long history and, in some cases, for their rarity. The double white primrose – one of her favourite plants in the world – she would later incorporate into a small ‘white garden’, a corner that would lead to several friendly disagreements with Vita Sackville-West, who had begun developing her own white garden in about 1950.

  Margery now became a full-blown advocate of ‘jungle’ planting, welcoming into her garden even hedgerow species such as thrift, sweet woodruff (‘the scent of new-mown hay is delicious’) and pink cow parsley, a plant whose ‘old-world dowdiness’ would have driven Walter quite mad. This was primarily an aesthetic decision; in Walter’s day the garden put on a show for just a few scant summer weeks, whereas she wanted it, teeming and replete, to look lovely all year round. But it was a practical move too. It was supposed to make life easier: the more crowded the scheme, the fewer the opportunities for weeds. No one had staff any more; the war had changed that* A full-time gardener was out of the question. Except that in Margery’s case this remained little more than a theory: weeds or no weeds, she was unable, or unwilling, ever to let up. A twelve-hour day was standard; visitors who rose for breakfast at 8.30 a.m. would inevitably find their hostess outside, trug in hand. In the summer she would garden after supper too. Luckily she
no longer felt the need to change for dinner; in Walter’s day she had sometimes found herself watering in the gloaming, standing there in the flower beds in her satin slippers and a hazardously long gown.

  Unimaginable as it sounds, during the war years flowers had all but disappeared from view: urged on by government pamphlets with titles like Cloches v. Hitler, and by Mr Middleton of the radio programme In Your Garden, Britain’s gardeners had dutifully given over their plots to vegetables.* Now, though, they were back: the roses and the dahlias, the geraniums and the begonias – and the brighter the better. With post-war austerity came a new lust for colour. ‘We can’t buy new clothes, we can’t get new curtains, we can’t paint our house, we’ve got nothing . . . except flowers!’ said Julia Clements, flower ‘decorator’ extraordinaire to members of the Women’s Institute. Thanks, moreover, to a national housebuilding programme, some people now had a garden of their own for the first time. It occurred to Margery, journalist manqué – while working for Walter she had somehow found the time to write the occasional piece for the women’s page of the Mail – that she might be in a position to advise all these eager new gardeners, and in 1951 she wrote her first article, for the Field.

  She was perfectly right, of course: people were ready to listen, and in the years that followed she would become ever more prolific, writing for Punch, Amateur Gardening, Popular Gardening, Homes & Gardens and the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. As she soon discovered, her effervescent plot had the virtue of being somewhat smaller than the great pre-war gardens people were now visiting in ever larger numbers (after the reclusive Lawrence Johnston* left it Hidcote Manor in 1947, the National Trust, which had previously only taken on houses, began accepting gardens, too); Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘small’ garden at Munstead Wood was fifteen acres to her two, and while Jekyll had employed a team of some fourteen gardeners, Margery still got by mostly on her own. Her readers could relate to her garden; it didn’t intimidate. The ideas she had deployed could very easily be replicated in a smaller space with just as effective results. When she wrote about East Lambrook she gave her readers a sense of possibility – and in this sense, she provided a bridge between gardening’s high-maintenance past and its low-maintenance future.

  Margery didn’t need to work; Walter had left her well provided for. But she wanted to. It was exciting to see her name in print again after all these years, and her writing, together with her growing renown as a plantswoman, had the curious effect of making her feel almost youthful; in 1952 she turned sixty and yet here she was, an unlikely pioneer, keeping company with a whole new generation of professional gardening women. It’s true that the Royal Horticultural Society was a bastion of male activity and would remain so for another decade. At botanic gardens and stately homes, head gardeners were still mostly men. But elsewhere women were quietly building their reputations: Alice Coates, crippled by arthritis and unable to continue as secretary to the Birmingham Group of artists, was furiously researching old plant varieties (her pioneering Flowers and Their Histories would be published in 1956); Frances Perry, author of Herbaceous Borders and Colour in the Garden, would shortly be appointed principal of the Norwood Hall Institute and College of Horticulture;* and Xenia Field, the daughter of a society rhododendron collector, had recently begun a gardening column for the Daily Mirror, which then had some five million readers.

  And then there were the two women who were making strides in the relatively new field of landscape architecture. Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe were graduates of Swanley Horticultural College and started their professional careers as domestic garden designers, Crowe for William Cutbush & Son’s nurseries in Barnet, Colvin for a variety of private clients. The going was tough – their fees, Colvin complained, were too low to provide for anything other than the smallest of livings – but the work was satisfying and it brought with it invaluable experience. By 1939 Colvin, the older of the two, had acted as adviser on some three hundred gardens, including one for Archduke Charles Albert Habsburg at his summer palace at Zywiec in Poland.† Crowe, meanwhile, had a won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show for a design featuring a contoured wood out of which a stream flowed into a naturalistic pond.

  During the war Crowe, elfin of face and a born diplomat, served with the Polish army in France as a volunteer ambulance driver and then as a sergeant in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service); Colvin, tall and gaunt and notoriously bad tempered, worked for the Women’s Farm and Garden Association, organising a training scheme for women gardeners in wartime, and as an Air Raid Precautions warden. Between shifts, they continued to attend meetings of the Institute of Landscape Design at its offices in Gower Street* (its secretary Gwen Browne, they noted, was now sometimes to be observed performing her duties in a tin hat.) ‘One got away from the grind of seeing things through and thought about the future,’ said Crowe. ‘One’s creative energies had had a stopper put on them and they came bubbling up.’ Having been involved with the Institute since its birth in 1929, they were not about to abandon it for the sake of a few bombs and, as a result, were able to play a role in the organisation’s crucial wartime decision not to merge with the Institute of Architects. In 1951 Colvin would be elected the Institute’s president, the first women to head any of the bodies that represented engineering or environmental professionals. Crowe would take up the same office in 1957.

  For Colvin and Crowe, the war changed everything: the turmoil brought with it opportunity, expectation, even hope. Not only would people’s sense of the meaning and reach of landscape architecture expand once the work of rebuilding Britain’s cities began, its practitioners would be able to influence the reconstruction from the very earliest stage. Colvin agreed with Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion and the author of the anti-sprawl polemic England and the Octopus, when he said, ‘We are now in for a new and splendid age, or else for chaos, and we cannot plan for chaos; so let us work for splendour, especially as by doing so we promote its likelihood.’ Speaking at a conference in 1943 Colvin argued that town planners needed to see landscape not as a kind of ‘ornament’ to be applied only when architects and engineers had finished their work, but as integral to the entire process.

  In 1945 Colvin and Crowe, by now close friends and holiday companions, began sharing a cramped office in Gloucester Place, near Baker Street. They also set to work on the fraught business of trying to influence post-war planning. Colvin contributed to a book, Bombed Churches as War Memorials, with a planting scheme for Christ Church, Newgate Street – it had an area devoted to the ‘veterans of 1940’, the self-sown flowers of the Blitz – and she published two texts, Trees for Town and Country and Land and Landscape, both of which would go on to become standard reference works. She also gave the Ministry of Transport advice on roads and how they might be made more attractive. Much more importantly, both women presented evidence to the New Towns Committee of 1946, which was chaired by Lord Reith.

  Such deep thinking and careful positioning paid off when they were duly appointed to senior roles at New Towns. In 1948 Crowe was made the consultant on landscape design at Harlow, Essex, where her job would be to bring to life the green spaces of Frederick Gibberd’s masterplan. Two years later Colvin was appointed to a similar job at East Kilbride in Scotland. Britain’s New Towns were a giant and slightly mad compromise: a third way between the pressures for new housing and the expansion of the suburbs, and the assiduous campaigning of organisations such as the Town and Country Planning Association, a conservative body that favoured low-density schemes. Throw into this mix the modernist ambitions of the architects employed on these projects – the majority were in thrall to Le Corbusier – and you have a recipe for muddle and disaster. They didn’t want to create ersatz market towns, they wanted to build boxes on stilts. Even so, it must have been exciting to be involved. At Harlow, for instance, Gibberd (now best known for Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral and the Regent’s Park Mosque) was employing some of the grooviest names of the day: Philip Powel
l and Hidalgo Moya, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, William Crabtree and H. T. Cadbury-Brown. He was also, as a friend and travelling companion of Geoffrey Jellicoe, the wartime president of the Institute of Landscape Design, a man known to be hugely sympathetic to landscape: for Crowe, Gibberd was pretty much the ideal collaborator.