If you think of garden history in terms of stately homes like Blenheim and Stowe, author Margaret Willes would urge you to think again. In a complicated modern world, we all long for something traditional and simple — and the cottage garden is back in fashion.

But what were cottage gardens actually like? Margaret, former publisher at the National Trust, set out to find out. Her latest book, The Gardens of the British Working Class, claims to be the first to bring the history of working-class gardening to the foreground.

In the 20th-century, upper-class Vita Sackville-West attempted to copy more humble gardeners on her estate at Sissinghurst, provoking the comment: “This is as much a cottage garden as Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid,” — a reference to the French queen’s habit of dressing up as a humble farmworker, while advising the lower classes to ‘eat cake’ when they were starving for want of bread.

Margaret aims to tell the story of people never sure where their next meal would come from, who needed a small plot to ward off starvation, but who also grew things for pleasure — including flowers.

She said: “I felt very strongly about that. A lot of people have said, ‘oh, it was only vegetables’, but gardens are spiritual as well as practical. I felt that gardeners love creating scent and colour if they can. People love flowers.”

Historians rely on documents, but she soon discovered that there was little written down about the gardens of the ‘lower classes’ before the 1700s.

“I relish a challenge, so I started in the 16th century, when there is very little evidence, because written records are not usually by working-class people.

“I used three strands: parish records alongside printed books, alongside recreations in open-air museums. Some academics would be very surprised that you can use re-creations, but they are very important for garden history.

“You can re-create a garden in a way that you cannot re-create a feast, because they are living plants and the way they grow is important.”

The rising interest in growing vegetables means that many stately home visits now include a look at the kitchen garden. Hidcote, in the Cotswolds near Chipping Campden, is one of several National Trust properties that feature a vegetable plot used to supply the famous cafés.

Margaret spent days studying the gardens at the Weald and Downland Museum in Sussex to see how historic plants were grown. For Victorian and later gardens, she went to Beamish Museum in Durham and St Fagan’s in Wales.

A lucky break came when she found former Oxford historian Raphael Samuel’s essay about life in Headington Quarry, a ‘squatter’ settlement that grew up at the time of the enclosures, when many poor people lost their rights to use common land.

One villager told Samuel it was “all ‘oles and alleys and ‘ills’ after centuries of quarrying to build Oxford’s colleges, followed by 19th-century bricklaying.

Margaret said: “I happened to suddenly see that Samuel mentioned in his book, published in the 1970s, that there was a diary by stonemason Charles Snow. I was so interested that I checked with the Oxfordshire Records Office that they had this diary. I was so excited that I got up at 6am to be sure of finding a parking space at the Cowley office.

“It is very unusual to get a working gardener’s diary — really unusual. I think the records office were rather surprised at my interest, though. They said, ‘There are a lot of references to the weather’. But that is what gardeners want, because it tells you a lot about what could be grown when.”

Samuel’s oral history project in Headington with Ruskin College recorded people’s memories of the Victorian and Edwardian period, which would otherwise have been lost. “They are very precious because in the 1970s there were people who could still remember, but of course it had never been written down.”

She added: “Because it was a squatter settlement, they could make their gardens as big as they wanted. The land was not good — it was a bit up and down because of the stone quarrying and there were stones and bricks, but they had enough space.”

Snow’s surviving relatives told the Ruskin researchers that he would get up at 4am in summer to work in his garden before going to work. His wages varied because work was insecure, mainly at Oxford colleges.

On January 23, 1882, he spent two shillings on hyacinth and tulip bulbs, paid a penny for a nosegay for his buttonhole and one shilling for flower pots.

On January 31, a fine day, he planted currant trees at the top of the garden.

One wet day, he cut and fresh-potted fuchsias. He noted potato varieties, including Elephants and Beauty of Hebron.

He made parsnip wine and pickled broccoli, buying vinegar and curry powder to do so, and sold strawberries and gooseberries in July.

“He provides,” says the book, “in this rare survival of a working-class gardener’s diary, a picture of a keen and knowledgeable gardener. There must have been many like him whose devotion to their gardens and allotments is lost to us.”

Another working-class gardener was Joseph Ashby, an agricultural trade union pioneer from Tysoe, near Banbury, who wrote of the foliage and “glowing petals” of cottage flowers, enhancing the beauty of the corner, bed or border where they were planned. Ashby was a strong supporter of the allotments movement, pressing for working-class communities to be given land for subsistence.

The produce did not only feed working families, it also provided useful extra income, with the area around Oxford at one time producing carnations and pinks for sale.

Joseph Turrill kept a diary of his market garden in Garsington, where he rented land from the estate of the Morrell brewing family. His mother was licensee of the Red Lion, where he helped out, so recorded working by moonlight during the early winter.

He describes visiting the Royal Oxford Horticultural Show, in the gardens of New College, although such shows were dominated by the aristocracy until later in the 19th century, when their appeal broadened. They gradually became one of the highlights of the calendar in some working-class communities.

The book also quotes Flora Thompson, who grew up in turn-of-the-century Juniper Hill (which she called Lark Rise), in north Oxfordshire, and described how allotment plots (allocated to allay starvation after the common was enclosed) were divided into two, ‘one half planted with potatoes, the other half with wheat or barley’.

Gardens were reserved for herbs and flowers, she said.

In the south of the county, towards Aylesbury, housewives reared and fattened ducks for the London market.

“This trade dated back at least to the 18th century, but reached its peak in the 1890s when birds were despatched in hampers and transported in carts or by railway. The cottage gardens were divided by planks into pens, with shedding to protect the birds. When the garden was used for ‘ducking’ an allotments was essential.”

Walter Rose, of Haddenham, near Thame, warned that a cottage garden given over to breeding was not an inviting sight. “The stench after a warm June shower was even worse to put up with.”

He described how the pig could be fed on ‘waste from the garden, trimmings of cabbages, peelings from potatoes and turnips, all and sundry were put by for its meals’. It was so important that it was considered rude to call on a neighbour without asking: “How’s the pig a-doing?”.

In the final chapter, Elder Stubbs allotments in Oxford get a mention for channelling the therapeutic side of gardening into projects with mental health charity Restore and producing vegetables for the homeless and unemployed.

All this is a far cry from the romanticised ideas of upper-class gardeners like Gertrude Jekyll, who made the ‘cottage garden’ fashionable in high society, rediscovering varieties that had previously been spurned by the aristocracy.

Ms Willes was delighted to discover that some neglected species, propagated by accident or by frugal seed-saving by cottagers, were saved from oblivion in working-class gardens, which acted as a ‘gene pool’ for varieties which would otherwise have died out.

In his famous garden at Hidcote, Major Lawrence Johnston created a ‘cottage garden’ in the early 20th century, complete with real thatched cottage, in the grounds of the manor house. The fashion reached its height at Sissinghurst, created after Sackville-West’s visit to Hidcote. Cottage flowers have recently returned to popularity, spearheaded by TV gardener Sarah Raven, whose husband owns Sissinghurst.

Ms Willes was intrigued by the seesaw effect as working-class gardeners adopted the fashions of their social superiors — until the pendulum swung back. “I like the circular movements, with people like miners trying to create grottoes in their backyards, perhaps in imitation of Stowe and Stourhead, and popularising rockeries and topiary, which had gone out of fashion higher up the scale. And of course there are garden gnomes.

“And it worked the other way around, because the fashion among the upper classes was for cottage flowers. “I was delighted to discover all these things. I hope other people will find it interesting.”

And has her research taught her anything to adopt in her own garden in Hackney? “I will definitely hope to do more mulching,” she said.

* The Gardens of the British Working Class is published on March 20 by Yale at £25.