"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." So concludes Felicity Lawrence in her review of The Garden Cottage Diaries in the Guardian Review, May 2, 2009. In her review, in which she also covers Fresh: A Perishable History by Susanne Friedberg (Harvard University Press), she describes Fiona Houston's year-long experiment as "a calculated protest, in an ancient and honourable tradition going right back to Virgil's Georgics."

Felicity Lawrence is a special correspondent for the Guardian and author of the bestselling exposes of the food business, Not on the Label and Eat Your Heart Out. The first of these titles was one of Fiona Houston's inspirations when she first thought about trying to live as people did in rural Scotland in the late eighteenth century.