A Taste for Gardening

Classed and Gendered Practices

Lisa Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317186458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is the garden a consumption site where identities are constructed? Do gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned by class and gender? This book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities. With an examination of aesthetic dispositions as a symbolic mode of communication closely aligned to peoples' identities and drawing on ethnographic data gathered from encounters with gardeners, this book maps a typology of gardening taste, revealing that gardening - how plants are chosen, planted and cared for - is a classed and gendered practice manifested in specific types of visual aesthetics. This timely and original book develops a new area within cultural studies while contributing to debates about lifestyle and lifestyle media, consumption, class and methodology. A must read for anybody concerned with or intrigued by the cultural construction of identification practices.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening

About the Book

Picture the scene. It is 1992 and I’ve just become a first-time homeowner with my partner somewhere in Cheshire. The house was built in 1904 and there is work to be done. It has a long back garden and a medium sized front, but the truth is that we don’t really know what to do with it. At the same time, because we teach media studies in higher education we watch quite a lot of terrestrial television, where the garden is enjoying some popularity, and I’m partial to the lifestyle section of the weekend broadsheet press. We settle in, the garden slides over to me on the ledger of domestic responsibilities and then as I start to think about ‘what to put in’, the whole idea of the garden as media representation, as space and as a cultural practise starts to make me think.

And that is where the seed of this book really began. Faced with the question of what to do with a ready-made ordinary1 domestic garden, a host of personal considerations about home-making began to meld together with some of my longheld interests. At this time the garden was receiving an enormous increase in media coverage, gardening magazines, such as Gardeners’ World, which was launched in 1991, had a circulation of 272, 000 and a 1.5 million readership by 1994, and there were a number of other successful titles such as Practical Gardening (Bhatti 1999, 188). The garden was also a prominent facet of ‘lifestyle’ television, the genre which has been labelled, ‘the genre of the nineties’ (Medhurst 1999). Television scholars had begun to notice a definite shift in the UK 1990s terrestrial schedules from the ‘hard’ programming of current affairs and documentaries to softer, hobbyist lifestyle programming of home interiors, cookery and gardening (Brunsdon et. al. 2001; Moseley 2000). Makeover popularity was at its height in the late 1990s, indeed the schedules were subject to what Brunsdon has called a, ‘day for night makeover takeover’ (2003, 7). Wider socio-political trends inform why lifestyle television was so popular during the period: the expansion in home-ownership in the UK (Bhatti 1999) alongside a general trend towards increased lifestyling in British culture were set against the backcloth of an aspirational atmosphere of New Labour’s ‘things can only get better’ campaign. Concomitantly, Brunsdon argues that factors such as women’s continued contribution to the work force; the deferral of the first child in families in higher social groups; and the appeal of independent lifestyle productions made by women for women prepared them to appreciate, the ‘multi-layered feminization of the 8-9 slot’ (Brunsdon 2003, 8). Actually, Brunsdon’s descriptions of women at the time aptly described me: I was watching and enjoying the rather more cultured makeover programmes of the minority channels such as Homefront in the Garden (BBC2, 1997-), and looking at the BBC books that were tied to television series, such as Gay Search’s Instant Gardening (1995) and magazines like New Eden that were aimed at helping relatively new gardeners to make a start. And while lifestyling the garden became a central trope in what Gripsrud calls the ‘shared cultural menu’ (2004, 213) of terrestrial television in the mid to late 1990s, people were also doing what the consumer address of lifestyle programmes was urging them to do: hungrily consuming gardening products in retailing. The garden industry’s political economy expanded and diversified during the period. Specialist nurseries became retail chains such as Wyevale and Hillier which sold not just plants, but a host of other products such as books, gifts, barbecues and outdoor garden furniture. Indeed, MINTEL (1997) reported a rise in sales of 27 per cent between 1988 and 1993 and spending of £3 billion in 1996 (Bhatti 1999, 188). No wonder Vogue called gardening ‘the new sex’ in Spring 1998.

But there were other things occupying my approach to my new garden, which troubled my thinking about the media images I was looking at during the mid to late 1990s. I began to think back to the garden I had grown up in, back in Yorkshire in the early 1970s and when I stopped to consider contemporary garden images, from television and magazines and at the goods that one could buy at the garden centre, it struck me that council estate gardening in Yorkshire had held something quite specific. It represented a set of aesthetic ideas, in terms of its plants, how they were arranged and the garden’s landscaping, that simply had no positive place in the mid-1990s garden culture I had begun to encounter. To pay homage to those aesthetics in the context of my own garden, I realised, would have been inappropriate, tasteless, a bad set of cultural choices. Why was this so, I wondered? Where did that lack of fit between the images I encountered and my own family garden come from? I began to realise that having access to middle-class images of the garden in the 1990s had revealed a gap between what had been desirable in Yorkshire in the 1970s and the culture I now inhabited. In this way, the impetus for the book started from my life experience of gardens and from the questions which emanated from the comparisons I made through my own class travelling form working-class origins to ‘becoming’, through education, middle-class. Indeed all the central questions addressed in this book come from an autobiographical root, for my own garden learning had come from affective female familial ties, from my grandmother, my aunt and from my mother. Did the tastes, preferences and knowledges I had about me in the 1990s have a specifically female edge? Why did I know about some plants and not others? How had my own location of class and gender positioned me in relation to garden culture? Effectively, it was these autobiographical questions which structured the pivotal questions around the research for the study.

This book is an empirical study about gardeners and gardening in late 1990s Britain. It records a specific moment in television, media and cultural history: it is about the ordinary cultural practise of gardening and its relationship with mediated images of the garden. The questions it asks and answers tell us something about the periodicity of classed and gendered relations in the garden and in television and media culture. And if there is to be a continuingly productive study of socio-cultural practises in relation to mediated culture, then it must learn from accounts of the past.

The book is organised around a number of key concerns which emanate from textual and ethnographic data gathered between 1998 and 1999; in this way, its findings detail a finite historical moment. Essentially it offers an analysis of the garden in television and media culture. Then using ethnographic data, it explores classed and gendered gardening practises as well as the relationship between media culture and gardening. Below, I sketch out the questions I pose in relation to these key concerns.

As a means of investigating the wider discursive regimes which play their part in the construction of ordinary classed and gendered identities, the book examines late 1990s images of the garden and gardening in the national and local lifestyle media. Using lifestyle programming and garden journalism, I ask if ordinary aesthetics were given legitimation in those representations of the garden. The book recognises the increased role of ordinary people as both ‘experts’ and lifestyle subjects. Arguing that this trend was indicative of a wider social shift in our culture, it asks whether the increase in ordinary subjects led to a concomitant embrace of previously marginalised representations of class and gender.

There are profound differences between how middle and working-class people have been socially, culturally and economically positioned in Britain since the nineteenth century. Domestic gardening has historically been conceived as a form of working-class regulation, while the middle-class have been positioned by urban planning as the group with the power to survey how the working-class live. I argue that working-class values have been systematically undermined by the institutional imposition of middle-class cultural values. And working-class people have more limited access to economic, social and cultural resources than members of the middle-class. This book shows how gardening has been used as a form of social class control. The chapters which follow unravel by what methods cultural values have been imposed on working-class people. Through an analysis of the varying distribution of resource assets, I ask if their equity bestows power on their owners and how such power is manifest in the context of the everyday practise of gardening. Arguing that gardening relies on taste as a symbolic mode of communication, which is closely imbricated with questions of identity, it asks whether different modes of classed and gendered being translate into how people practise gardening. And if there is a classed and gendered aesthetic, what factors comprise its visual look?

Since the book asks if gardening forms part of class identity, I ask what locations of gender bring to classed modes of gardening. The construction of gender is predicated on its proximity to class locations. Working-class women, for example, have historically been denied the right to be ladies, because of their distance from middle-classness. I question what gendered proximities to class bring to gardening practises: I ask, for example, what differences reside in the kinds of masculine and feminine gardening working- and middle-class people do. Recognising that gender is always classed, the book also questions what differences exist between men and women’s gardening: can gardening be understood historically as a gendered practise?; do men and women practise different types of gardening?; are cultural resources gendered?; and is there a specifically gendered collection of aesthetic practises forged out of a specific set of socio-cultural factors?

Turning to the relationship between the media and its gardening audience, I explore how class, gender and age impinged on lifestyle media consumption during the period. I investigate whether gardeners felt incited to use or interpret lifestyle ideas or projects and, using the garden makeover genre in particular, I ask gardeners about their relationship with garden ‘experts’. Were local gardening competences, which reside in dimensions of ordinariness, preferable to lifestyle ideas mediated at the national level? And finally, I ask whether ordinary gardening as a traditional way of life was preferable to lifestyling: might these practises enable people an imaginative means to cope with rapid social change?

This section has placed the book’s historical perspective on the garden as a specific moment in late 1990s British television, media and culture. In what follows I discuss how the people of the study were contacted and recruited, their brief biographies, how they were ‘classed’ and how the interviews in domestic settings took shape.

Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening

Why ethnography?: key traditions in cultural studies and feminism

Cultural studies has always sustained a steady stream of ethnographic work (Moores 1996; Murdock 1997; Turner 1990) and the two traditions share common concerns. Historically, as a mode of enquiry, ethnography has links with the ethos of how culture was theorised by early writers in British cultural studies (Van Loon 2001). In the historiographical accounts of early culturalists (Hoggart 1957; Williams 1989) for example, the historical continuity of the English working-class, (outlined in more detail in chapter 2), operated at the mundane level of ordinary, everyday life experience. Research in the culturalist tradition centred on the generation of shared meanings by members of groups or societies in the midst of particular cultural phenomena. For them, ordinary people were theorised as active agents, responsible for generating their own sense of world-being. These emphases show the intrinsic connections between culturalism and how ethnography can be deployed:2 both underline the pivotal role of everyday life and its meaningfulness for members as they define it ‘from below’; both place an emphasis on charting specific examples of sense-making in lived culture; both are committed to uncovering and valuing local knowledges; and both are concerned to chart these meanings on their own terms.

For thinkers who align themselves with the culturalist strand of thought in cultural studies, the act of deriving meanings from sustained social contact with agents and recording and representing them on their own terms impacts on how theory is positioned in ethnographic projects. In their opening manifesto to the first issue of Ethnography (2000) for example, Willis and Trondman argue for ‘”theoretically informed” ethnographic study’ (2000, 6), but for them the knowledge produced by ethnography should never be ‘pre-figured’ by theory. Rather, as Willis argued in 1980, ethnography, ‘has directed its followers towards a profoundly important methodological possibility – that of being ‘surprised’, of reaching knowledge not prefigured in one’s starting paradigm’ (Willis 1996, 90). Ideally for Trondman and Willis (2000), ethnographic evidence should actually modify and refine theory: ‘ethnographic writing,’ they argue, ‘has a crucial role to play in reshaping “theory” and in finding accommodations between, as well as forging new lines and directions from, social theorists’ (Willis and Trondman 2000, 8). Some ethnographic work demonstrates how agency can contribute to the production of structure. In Learning to Labour (1977) for example, Willis demonstrates how the agency of ‘the lads’, their decisions and strategies for coping with the British class system, partially helped to structure the reproduction of class divisions. In this way, ethnographic methods enable the researcher to reconstruct a perspective from below in a way which shows the link between subjective micro-politics of everyday life and the macro-power structures which inhere within culture.

While I have so far sought to trace the mutual connections between cultural studies and ethnographic methods, there are also intellectual affinities between cultural studies and feminism. Both are concerned with the oppressed and with the role of lived experience (Gray 1997). Both have valorised the aim to represent the lives, voices and experiences of the silenced and the subaltern and both have fought a mutual antagonistic battle with academe as a consequence.3 There have been a number of feminists working within media, film and cultural studies who have also been influenced by audience-reception studies, whose work focuses specifically on women’s uses of the media. Studies such as Hermes’s (1995) Reading Women’s Magazines examines women’s reading repertoires and everyday modes of consumption of magazines; Stacey’s (1994) Star Gazing investigates acts of spectatorship and the role of female film stars in women’s memories of wartime and post-war Britain; and Gray’s (1992) Video Playtime examines class and taste in relation to women’s use of VCR technology in the context of the gendered power dynamics of the household.

I want to place my own research within these traditions: the culturalist strand of cultural studies and feminism. I draw on its techniques because its methods are suitable for the kind of knowledge about ordinary gardening my book aims to produce. This study shares the early culturalist mission to value peoples’ lived experience at the level of ordinary, everyday culture. It seeks to uncover the shared meanings and collective activities which inhere in gardening and it relates them to the wider cultural context in which experience is located. It envisions people as active agents, capable of creating their own sense of being-in-the-world. And it aspires to develop and represent local knowledge – as far as possible, on its own terms – about the experience of gardening in the context of people’s own private gardens. In chapter 3, I argue that ordinariness has largely been vilified and that both women and the working-class have been the prime casualties of exclusion from the official annuls of academia: this project aims to give voice to such previously unheard voices as a means to value, legitimate and take them seriously. And sentient of the call to allow the ethnographic evidence to modify or at least temper the certainties of theory, I hope to allow the data in chapters which follow to surprise the reader with new, hitherto uncovered knowledge about ordinary gardening.

Why ethnography?: the garden as a new consumption site

While the home as setting has already been the subject of academic scrutiny, the garden offers new terrain to the cultural analyst. There is an established body of ethnographic work which examines the construction of class and gender in relation to domestic media consumption, utilising a variety of popular media genres and forms such as romance novels (Radway 1987), soap opera (Hobson 1982), the VCR (Gray 1992), television (Morley 1986), satellite television (Moores 1996), women’s magazines (Hermes 1995), talk shows (Wood 2008) and reality television (Wood et al. 2008). Part of the political project of this body of cultural studies and feminist work was to conduct analysis of subjective locations, using the media, within the lived and familial power nexus of the home. While my book shares the need to examine the domestic setting in pursuit of similar political objectives, it also makes a spatial departure from this previous work. My analysis calls for the need to attend to the particular specificity of the garden as a different type of consumption space. Gardens are spaces about which one can make a range of general assumptions. Gardens are peculiar, hybrid spaces: part private, part public. In one sense they appear to exist as part of the private realm: decisions about them are often made inside the privacy of the home between family members and they are conceived and constructed as partially private extensions of the home dwelling (Bhatti 1999; Chevalier 1998; Sime 1993). Gardens are also located close to spaces within the home which have been conceived as private, domestic, ‘feminine’ zones – the kitchen and the dining area for example. On the other hand, the garden is an interface between the privacy of the house and the civic property of the street. It is a space onto which others can look, examine and judge. The sign-bearing garden offers an appearance that is public property; it acts as a character map of the people within the home. It is also one of the most profound and tangible manifestations of the class location of the breadwinner/s inside. Like the domestic spaces to which it is linked, it too generates work, but because it is at least partially public, that work can be seen and is on display. And just as the garden is located near to the feminine and the domestic, the garden is also attached to ‘masculine’ zones: for example the garden/tool shed and the garage. In these ways gardens are complex spaces which offer a new kind of window through which to investigate ordinary gender and class relations. Yet to date the assertions I discuss here remain at the level of assumption without the evidence of asking people, in the context of their own gardens, about how the garden as a space with a particular, yet specific tie to the familial, domestic setting is actually managed. There is a dearth of British, cultural studies empirical work on the garden as a material spatial entity; and there is, as I establish in chapter 3, no study which addresses the particular questions about class and gender in relation to the private small town garden addressed in this book. I argue therefore that in order to find out whether gardens as spaces where dichotomies such as professional/domestic, public/private, masculine/feminine, work/leisure, exterior/interior remain staunchly intact or whether those boundaries can be eschewed as some navigate different ways of constructing their class and gender locations, one needs participant centred research methods. The garden as a new consumption space with its own specificities, requires ethnographic enquiry: this method has the potential to reveal whether the ideas and assumptions about the garden as a specific nexus of classed and gendered power relations have any material grounding in peoples’ homes.

Finding Out …: Towards an Ethnography of Gardening

This book is based on a small-scale empirical study of a group of gardeners based in the North of England. I lived, for an eight month period, in the same small town community of the gardeners on which this study is based (for a resume of how the respondents were accessed, their personal details and how they are ‘classified’ by the study see Appendix 1). I draw on Bourdieu to argue that gardening is a field; a social sphere where struggles occur over access to its particular resources (for a more detailed definition of Bourdieu’s terms see chapter 2). The practises in th...