Rows of farm cottages, neat village houses of dressed stone and older dwellings built of rubble, clay-and-bool and even mud can still be found in their thousands in the Eastern Lowlands. In a myriad ways, the landscape of today is still recognisably the landscape of improvement. But no East Lothian hind or Angus weaver would recognise the gardens of their cottages today. The characteristic layout of vegetable beds separated by cinder paths, with climbers covering the walls and roofs and narrow flower beds squeezed up against the house walls, have long gone, along with the middens and the pigsties.

The Scottish countryside has become increasingly the preserve of the middle class, and for them the cottage rows have been remodelled into single dwellings with conservatories and extensions. New country dwellers often have little time for intensive gardening and prefer the idea of an outdoor living space to that of an outdoor larder. The gardens now contain driveways, garages, patios and spaces for barbecues, and lawns planted with trees and shrubs have replaced the vegetable plots. Sometimes they have been landscaped in imitation of the grounds of great houses. Other cottage gardens have shrunk as slices have been taken off for development or to enlarge the surrounding fields. On the other hand, there are some cottage gardens which have kept, or rediscovered, their role as providers of fruit and vegetables, with added polytunnels, hen-coops and beehives. Nevertheless, to travel through today's Lowland countryside is to pass through a far more prosperous, more manicured, but also less productive landscape than that investigated by journalists and government commissioners before the First World War.

The legacy of the gardening cottagers of this book needs to be sought not in today's country cottages but amongst the allotment-holders and the community gardeners, mostly urban, of the twentieth century and today. Like the old cottage gardens, allotments are designed to feed families. Like the old cottage gardens, they had originally a moral dimension – allocated to the deserving poor or, between the wars, to the unemployed. Nowadays allotments may have lost this dimension, but have been consciously transformed into havens of quiet contemplation, social interaction, mutual support and environmental regeneration.