Back to her roots

Published on Tuesday 24 February 2009 15:05

For most of us, the answer would be "no". Especially if we thought that the experience was going to last for a whole year. But for Fiona J Houston, author of The Garden Cottage Diaries, spending 12 months living an 18th-century lifestyle seemed the right thing to do.

"I don't romanticise the past, but it intrigues me," says Houston. She explains that her unique experiment developed after reading a book called Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence. The book laid bare the workings of modern food production, leaving Houston convinced the people in Scotland were better fed at the end of the 18th century than they are now. "Someone called my bluff," she explains. "'You try living as they did in the 18th century,' he said. So I decided I would."

Houston had long been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Time spent in museums, reading books and studying paintings from the period meant she already had a fair idea of what putting the clock back would involve. Some research of her own family history revealed a schoolteacher and his wife, Anne and William Houston, who lived in Galloway during the 1790s. She decided that the couple's lifestyle would act as the benchmark for her own experience. A tumbledown byre in the grounds of her Peeblesshire home was brought up to habitable standard, and the experiment began.

While many of us garden for pleasure, Houston's focus was going to be on feeding herself. "It didn't take too much new planning, because I already fed my family from the garden," she says. "It was more a case of adapting to the century: I wasn't going to be able to grow exotic vegetables, tomatoes or courgettes – although they were growing marrows, so there's nothing to stop you eating baby marrows."

Houston explains that during the era there would have been two levels of gardening going on. The typical cottage garden might have grown some potatoes, kale, cabbage and maybe some onions, and that was probably the extent of it. On the other hand, records show that a lot of other vegetables were being grown in Scotland.

"We know that there were seed lists and there were great gardens being formed," says Houston. "At one level of society there was quite a fervour for vegetable gardening."

Traquair House, with its sizeable walled garden, was close to Houston's cottage and her ancestors would no doubt have known the gardener there. "It would have been the matter of a seed here and something that's fallen off the plant there," she says. "That gave me license to grow a much broader range of plants."

The Garden Cottage Diaries makes it clear that living without central heating, electricity, washing machines and all the other luxuries we take for granted was at times a cold, bleak experience. Gathering firewood each day, washing from a bowl and living in several layers of petticoats took some getting used to. Houston was faithful to the clothing of the period, wearing a day dress, complete with striped aprons and up to three petticoats for warmth. When it came to gardening in costume, "it was a bit of a nuisance," she says, "but you sort of adjust to it."

Using garden tools faithful to the period didn't involve any particular hardship, although Houston admits she did miss her lightweight stainless steel hoe. Easy methods of pest control – garden fleece, for instance – had to be forgone and some of the old varieties of seeds she tried had mixed results.

"I grew some really interesting plants and they were wonderful in a way, but they did show up something about plant breeding, because I felt they all had limitations," she says. Although some of the vegetables were delicious, many were prone to disease or had poor germination rates. It led Houston to the conclusion that to have gardened successfully in the past, you had to have a lot more skill.

The flower garden was left pretty much to its own devices. "I've got herbaceous borders but they were second-best citizens," she says. "I tried to keep the weeds out of them and enjoyed them when they were in flower, but when you are doing a big vegetable plot on your own, you've just got to get on with it."

Houston's food supplies over the year included a huge variety of produce, from parsnips, leeks and kale in March to a bounty including peas, lettuces, broad beans, beetroots, strawberries and raspberries in July.

With no freezer available, Houston had to turn her hand to pickling, drying and other methods of preserving that are no longer common knowledge. She includes a range of traditional recipes in her book, delights such as rumbledethumps and barley bannocks, as well as recipes using foraged foods, such as wild garlic paste.

She used plants to cure ailments – a comfrey and rosemary poultice on an injured hand, for example; made nettle string; used a birch bud extract as a hair rinse and even made her own brushes, using twigs. The plants in her garden and wider countryside had never been so well-used.

By the end of the year, Houston says she felt fitter and had eaten well. But she makes the point that given the Scottish climate, being self-sufficient would have carried great risks for our ancestors. As for her approach to her outdoors plot: "It's not changed my gardening, but it has changed my purchasing," she says. "I think I buy far less now. And I liked living on my own resources." We may not all want to immerse ourselves so completely in a bygone era, but it seems we have plenty to learn from the ways our ancestors lived.

&#149 The Garden Cottage Diaries: My Year in the 18th Century by Fiona J Houston, is published by Saraband, priced 17.95. For more details, visit www.saraband.net