The Garden Cottage Diaries: My Year in the Eighteenth Century

I’ve just read [The Garden Cottage Diaries] – non stop as it is such a pleasure. What a treat. It is so beautifully produced; a real joy to hold as well as read. .. [The writing] is so beautiful: clear, fluent, evocative, poetic and a vivid recreation of place, emotions and style of life. I’m very interested in the relationship a writer builds with his/her reader and felt [this book] made the reader feel respected and included. –Kay Dunbar, Festival Director, Ways With Words

Fiona Houston writes with a light and wry humour… As an entirely intriguing experiment in experiencing the raw past of life in the Borders. I hope this essay will sell widely and for many years to come. –Southern Reporter, 26/2/09

Fiona Houston, a Scottish museum researcher… contacted me in 2004, having read my book on the ills of the industrial food system, Not On the Label, to tell me it had inspired her to live the life of her pre-industrial ancestors. The Garden Cottage Diaries: My Year in the Eighteenth Century is the result. It’s a sumptuously produced book about self-imposed deprivation. Its still-life photos of her cottage and vegetable garden evoke a simplicity that is more like something from an interiors magazine than a vision of grim subsistence. But it’s all done with great wit and intelligent determination. Houston, having swaddled herself for the 12 months in layers of heavy, home-made wool clothes, describes life without electricity, running water or the motor car. Growing enough to eat turns out to be hard work, but not impossible. Walking everywhere is liberating. Being permanently cold and damp, however, is more of a challenge. … This is not so much the romantic delusion Freidberg fears food campaigners now suffer from, but a calculated protest, in an ancient and honourable tradition going right back to Virgil’s Georgics The answer to our current crisis – global warming, growing fears about food security, the social injustice embedded in the food system – lies not in an anti-modern backlash, as shown by Freidberg’s reminders of how food production has changed. But there is still a place for Houston’s type of exercise in self-denial. Questioning the nature of progress and how far material sustenance is necessary to happiness is a sane response in a relentlessly consuming and resource-depleted world. –Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian, 2 May 2009

Fiona Houston writes with a light and wry humour… As an entirely intriguing experiment in experiencing the raw past of life in the Borders. I hope this essay will sell widely and for many years to come. –Southern Reporter, 26/2/09