Chapter 3 - COTTAGERS’ GARDENS

Summary

Every cottage had its conveniently situate garden …1/8 of an acre. Early potatoes were its staple product, and as these were cleared off, the land was planted with Cabbages, but chiefly hardy winter Greens; but there were always plots of summer Cabbage, Leeks, Potato, and Onions, sometimes a patch of Chamomile, Hyssop, and other simples, and perennial flowers, and sometimes several hives of bees.

So wrote a correspondent to the leading national gardening magazine, the Gardener's Magazine, recalling the labourers’ cottage gardens of East Lothian of the 1840s. To find out how typical these were, then and later, how they came about and why they were different from the kailyards is the purpose of this chapter.

Cottagers’ gardens as we describe them here were a by-product of the massive social and economic changes that began in the last half of the eighteenth century. ‘Not until about the end of the 18th century did cottage gardening with its combined vegetable and flower culture make headway in Scotland.’ Key to the change was the demand by improving landowners and farmers for labourers for draining, enclosing, building, road-making and making and maintaining farm equipment. Like the farm servants, they needed to be housed within reach of the farms, and every house came with a garden. The generosity of landowners and farmers in handing over land often initially rent-free is explained by this demand for labour. The land for gardens allowed to other workers, from miners and mill workers to lighthouse keepers, served the same basic function of providing food for workers and their families far from villages. As well as these groups, there were the village gardeners, skilled tradesmen such as masons, joiners, smiths, saddlers, wrights, tailors and shoemakers and handloom weavers. These workers flourished under improvement, as their specialist skills were required for new steadings, new farmhouses, ploughs, carts, harnesses and so on, while rising real wages for many created a market for clothing and household goods.

Not all lived in cottages – some mill workers lived in tenements – but all had gardens attached to their homes to supply them with food for their families.