Alice Vincent

Alice Vincent is a garden writer. WE MADE A GARDEN by Margery Fish

Pavilion Books, £9.99, ISBN 978-1849943642

It was only after I had read this book that I learned how large Margery Fish’s legacy loomed in British horticulture. This was a happy accident, I think, as Margery’s frank, and often funny, record of redefining the modern English cottage garden at her home of

East Lambrook Manor in Somerset unfolds best when you don’t quite know what the outcome will be. Mrs Fish’s Garden, as those who still tend to it call it, heaves with visitors most weeks of the year, but this book allows the reader to conjure an exquisite image through her words. Fish writes with the clean, plain passion of the plant-devoted and determined, and what I find most inspiring about her account of the garden is her growing confidence as the years pass and, in the wake of her husband Walter’s death, a permission-granting of taking the garden on as her own. THE MORVILLE HOURS: THE STORY OF A GARDEN by Katherine Swift

Bloomsbury Publishing, £14.99, ISBN 978-0747598237

Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours is like one of those plants you learn about and then see in all the best gardens, quietly astonished that it took you so long to find. It was published in 2008, and is usually on book shops’ gardening shelves, but I didn’t read it until 2020, during that locked-down winter, finding myself transported from the same south London walls to the crisped lawns and moonlight of New Year’s Eve in slumbering Shropshire, where Swift begins her richly layered story of The Dower House Garden at Morville. The book’s chronology spans years and hours simultaneously; Swift bases its structure on the ancient Hours of the Divine Office, used by monks. But in gardening time is both everything and nothing at all, making it an ideal summer read, too. As Swift writes: ‘In the garden, where I was acutely aware of the passage of time there was paradoxically the feeling of having all the time in the world, of hours and days stretching and expanding into a shimmering pool of now.’

Look out for Alice’s new monthly column starting in the July issue.