‘At present there is too much of the “kale yard” about a hind's [farm servant’s] garden’, wrote R. Hunter Pringle, concluding, as Assistant Commissioner, his report on agricultural workers in the Lothians for the 1893 Royal Commission on Labour. What he meant was a very limited range of crops and a clinging to traditional modes of cultivation. This chapter describes these gardens, the direct descendants of the ancient Scottish kailyards, provided, along with the house, as part of the farm servant's wage.

The criticism implied in Pringle's choice of words is deliberate. By the end of the nineteenth century the term ‘kale yard’ or ‘kailyard’ (the older spelling) had become indisputably negative, not least because of the ‘Kailyard School’, a disparaging label applied to the hugely popular works of J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett, Ian Maclaren and others for their sentimental depictions of rural life stuck in an unchanging and parochial past.

The words for garden in all European and Slavic languages derive from roots that mean ‘enclosure’. ‘Yard’ itself is related to Indo-European ‘gher’ or fence, and thence to Old English ‘geard’. Kailyards in Scotland go back to the Middle Ages and perhaps further, and can still be found today in Shetland (Plate 7). Anyone, rich or poor, landowner or cottar, could have a kailyard for raising vegetables before the era of improvement. They were defined by George Skene Keith in 1811 as ‘a small enclosure of a few falls of ground for planting coleworts [kale] or raising garden roots’. The enclosure – a dyke, hedge or fence – was essential to protect the intensively cultivated kailyards from free-ranging cattle and children. On the unenclosed infield and outfield land farmers relied on small boys – the farm servants’ sons – to keep livestock and other predators off the growing crops.

Kailyards were important. Barony (local) courts in the seventeenth century set regulations to ensure that tenants and sometimes cottars had kailyards for greens and that they protected them with dykes. Tenants were also frequently obliged to plant ash trees around the kailyards. The range of crops was always limited. Farmers were even discouraged from attempting to grow vegetables other than the most basic.