Scotland’s climate and soil have shaped our horticultural history and will continue to do so for centuries to come. Ken Cox and Caroline Beaton’s Fruit and Vegetables for Scotland is a trove of how-to information for the Scottish gardener. This extract tells of some of the innovative ways in which Scots have coaxed food from the ground.

Scotland’s love affair with the walled garden began in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The first were extensions to the walls of traditional L-shaped baronial castles but, as the need for fortification passed, the gardens became larger and more elaborate. ‘The kitchen garden is the best of all gardens,’ John Reid writes in the first-ever Scottish gardening manual, The Scots Gard’ner (1685). He gives specific instructions on how to make one – ‘Make the bordures 6 foot broad’ – and explains where it should be sited – ‘The kitchen garden may be placed nearest the stables, for the convenience of wheeling in manure, and out of sight of the house; because of the impropriety of the view.’

One of the reasons for the popularity of walled gardens in Scotland was that the microclimates and shelter afforded by the walls allowed a wide range of otherwise tender fruit and vegetables to be successfully grown, and over a much longer season. The warmth of south and west walls was perfect for protecting blossom and ripening fruit, and their height protected tender plants from the full force of Scotland’s ferocious winds. The series of eighteenth-century walled gardens along the coasts of Caithness and Sutherland – Dunbeath, Langwell, Castle of Mey and Sandside – are carefully sited to afford the maximum amount of shelter. Horticultural consultant Colin Stirling gives the example of a walled garden in Orkney where the wind shelter allows potatoes to be harvested three weeks earlier than those planted outside the walls.

Not all walled gardens are fully walled and not all are of conventional shapes. Many have three walls, leaving the lower end fenced to allow frost to drain. There are several oval walled gardens in Scotland but Netherbyres, near Berwick, is the only elliptical walled garden in the world. Others follow the contours of the land or, in the case of Inverewe, the curved beach.

By the mid eighteenth century, the fashion was to build walled gardens away from the house and often on a considerable scale. Amongst the largest in Scotland are Hopetoun (over 20 acres), Brechin Castle (13 acres), Blair Castle’s Hercules Garden (9 acres), Amisfield (7 acres) and Wemyss Castle (6 acres). Some were divided into two or more compartments – for orchard, cut flowers and vegetables, for example. By the end of the eighteenth century, a country estate was not considered complete without a productive walled garden.

A permanent monument to the art of eighteenth- century fruit growing is Scotland’s most extraordinary garden building, the Dunmore Pineapple near Falkirk, constructed c.1775 to celebrate the first production of pineapples in heated frames. Scotland’s important fruit and vegetable experts of the period included James Justice, whose The Scots Gardiner’s Director (1765) was a primer for anyone running a walled garden. Scot William Forsyth ran the Royal Kitchen Gardens for George III at Kensington Palace in London. He was famous for treating tree canker with a mix of cow dung, lime and wood ashes.

The nineteenth century saw a golden age of horticultural innovation born of new technologies. Gardeners were expected to keep their employers’ tables filled with fresh food year-round. Melons, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash and other tender vegetables began to be produced with the aid of artificial heat. Heated walls, stove houses and glasshouses enabled crops such as apricots and vines to be grown in Scotland’s walled gardens. From the 1750s onwards, hot beds of manure, heating up as they composted, provided a source of warmth for protecting and forcing crops in winter and early spring. Recently The National Trust’s garden at Acorn Bank in Cumbria has been experimenting with raised beds heated through the winter under low plastic tunnels by the composting of a mixture of manure and sawdust. I was amazed at the results of this ‘free’ heat, allowing perfect crops of lettuces ready to harvest from March onwards. As fuel prices rise ever upward, I suspect that some of these old and forgotten methods of raising food will come back into vogue.

The nineteenth century witnessed the first celebrity garden writers in horticultural magazines and books. Despite being crippled with arthritis, Scots polymath J. C. Louden (1783–1843) sustained a career as a botanist, garden designer and town planner, prolific writer and garden magazine editor. He had an opinion on almost everything and is said to have published a mind-boggling 66 million words in a lifetime’s writing. His An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) (available to download free from Google Books) is surely the most ambitious Scottish horticultural book of all time. The 1,052 pages cover every aspect of gardening: the origins of garden plants, botany, soils, fertiliser and the cultivation of fruit and vegetables in Britain and other countries. Much of his advice on crop rotation, prevention of disease, manures, propagation and pruning is as sound today as it was then, and the range of wisdom and common sense puts many more recent authors to shame. However, his views on crop protection would raise a few eyebrows these days. In the chapter ‘Means of Defence’, Louden recommends ‘the man trap . . . a barbarous contrivance though rendered absolutely necessary in the exposed gardens around great towns’; the humane man trap, ‘which simply breaks the leg’; and the spring gun, ‘a variety of blunderbuss . . . found extremely useful in the neighbourhood of London’.

By the mid nineteenth century, hot beds and heated walls had gradually fallen from favour. The rapid evolution of glasshouse technology led to the construction of large-scale practical and ornamental greenhouses, vineries and palm houses. Scot Charles McIntosh published the influential The Greenhouse, Hothouse and Stove (1838), a manual of new techniques for forcing exotic crops. Greenhouses were used both to supply tender and out-of-season fruit and vegetables and to house the now-fashionable exotic plants sent back from all over the world by intrepid plant hunters. Many Scottish landowners had access to abundant coal, which they used to heat glasshouses to produce tropical delicacies. Edinburgh-based greenhouse company MacKenzie and Moncur designed and built many of Scotland’s finest greenhouse complexes, such as those still extant at Geilston, Kailzie and Dunskey.

In parallel with the fruit and vegetable adventures of Britain’s upper classes, an entirely different strand of gardening evolved through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – that of competitive fruit and vegetable shows, held amongst the workers in the newly industrialising cities. Lancashire weavers became fanatically competitive gooseberry growers, producing fruit the size of apples, and this craze spread north to Scotland. The 1827 catalogue of Edinburgh nurserymen Dicksons and Co. lists an astonishing 194 varieties of gooseberry. Competitive showing of vegetables continues to this day with the Scottish branch of the National Vegetable Society.

Fruit and Vegetables for Scotland: What to Grow and How to Grow It by Ken Cox and Caroline Beaton is published by Birlinn (£20, paperback) www.birlinn.co.uk

PAPERBACKS

GOODBYE, VITAMIN

Rachel Khong (Scribner, £8.99)

Having been ditched in

an especially loathsome way by her fiancé, 30-year-old Ruth has gone to spend Christmas at her parents’ house in California. Her father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and when her mother asks if Ruth will stay with them for a year, it seems like a reasonable request. She has to sort herself out after her traumatic breakup, after all, and get her life back on track after being subordinated to her ex-fiancé’s ambitions. Looking after her father as he regresses into helplessness turns out to be just what Ruth needs to help her grow up. After discovering a journal full of his observations of her as a child, she in turn begins one showing how their roles are reversing as she looks after him in old age. Set out in a diary format, Khong’s prose is lean, spare and inflected with millennial irony – not in a way that denotes detachment, but perfectly capable of being touching and gently funny.

THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR

Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £8.99)

Hollinghurst doesn’t spring any surprises in his sixth novel. That’s no bad thing, as The Sparsholt Affair is arguably his best. It stretches from David Sparsholt’s arrival in Oxford in 1940 to his artist son Johnny coming to terms with gay life in London in 2012, tracing a thread of hidden longing and public scandal through an era of great change for gay men. It’s divided into five sections, each written in a style matching the period and each containing elements which mirror others in some way – power cuts during the Three Day Week echoing blackouts of the Blitz being a particularly nice touch. Crucial parts of the action take place between chapters, forcing us to work out the specifics of the “affair” and leaving the title character unexpectedly enigmatic. Hollinghurst’s prose is, as always, rich, imaginative and beautifully turned.

THINGS CAN ONLY GET WORSE?

John O’Farrell (Black Swan, £8.99)

A lifelong Labour supporter, O’Farrell charts the agonies of following the party from the 1997 General Election win to the present. Supporting a party that was suddenly in power proved to be a minefield of contradictions and soul-searching, and that was even before O’Farrell got active himself, as a campaigner and even standing against Theresa May. Another by-election, in 2013, saw the Tories use quotes from this book’s predecessor, Things Can Only Get Better, against him. He came fourth. Whatever you think about his politics, O’Farrell is a humourist first and on that level he delivers, highlighting the absurdity of his experiences (handing out Labour leaflets to Tory yacht owners from a dinghy isn’t even the most surrreal) and loading it with as many laughs as possible.