The history of cottage gardens in Scotland is short, often depressing and sometimes puzzling. It is likely that cottage gardens in the English sense, with flowers and fruit as well as vegetables, were unknown in Scotland before the late 1700s. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries travellers, agricultural and horticultural commentators and philanthropists bemoaned the cottagers’ neglect more often than they noticed bright and well-kept gardens. A landowner lamenting the weed-infested and badly cultivated plots found them inexplicable in ‘a country which supplies England with some of her best gardeners’, for this was the period that saw professional gardeners, often from humble backgrounds, prized for their skill, knowledge, education and reliability by the owners of mansions and palaces across Britain, Europe and even further afield.

While the gardens of the wealthy were, as innumerable studies have demonstrated, designed to display taste and culture, attract attention and admiration and provide delight, relaxation and fine produce in equal measure, the very different purpose and character of the cottage garden has been, until recently, largely ignored, or at best dealt with summarily. Even Edward Hyams – a notable exception to this approach – remarked that ‘of course, it was in the great gardens of the rich and mighty, and not in the little gardens of the poor and humble, that both the art of gardening and the science of horticulture developed’. Although he was in fact rescuing the cottage garden from obscurity, that ‘of course’ betrays a common perception of cottage gardens as also-rans, well behind the great gardens rather than in a different race.

In Scotland the story of these gardens, even more than in England, is largely missing from both garden histories and social histories. This book seeks to tell the story of this neglected subject. It is also an attempt to explain the significance of cottage gardens in the lives of the poor and their value to the workers, their employers and the wider rural economy and society.

Cottage gardens were important primarily as a source of food for workers’ families. Among the poor, vegetables, albeit a very limited range for most, played a bigger part than in the diet of any other class.