Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 92

moves are not all that the shift to lifestyle had to offer. Moseley, for example, argues
that to read the primetime shift as, 'a move from hard to soft, from documentary
to makeover, from address to citizen to consumer, from public to private and from
“quality” to “dumbed-down” television' is to ignore the complex issues made by that
shift (Brunsdon et al. 2001: 33). For her, lifestyle address straddled these dualisms:
viewers were 'citizen-consumers' who could, 'on a small, local scale, learn to make
changes, make a difference, improve the personal for the national good' (Brunsdon
et al. 2001, 34). Analysis of lifestyle programming undoubtedly reveals that lifestyle
ideas held a measure of educational value for citizens. They also offered people the
opportunity, within the context of the commonplace routines of their everyday lives,
to mould the strategies and sites of lifestyle in ways which helped them to navigate
their own relationship to social change.
In these ways, this section demonstrates that while, as illustrated in chapter 4,
garden legislators exclude ordinary people, there was an institutional place where
ordinary people were included, addressed as equals and given a positive site of
identification. The spaces where legislators reside, which undoubtedly remain the
most culturally lauded, remain intact in academe and in traditional middle-class
literary quarters and they continue to furnish educated, middle-class readers with
values about the garden. Ordinary people as consuming citizens however, had the
choice to turn away from legislators and towards the media as a site which allows them
to see images of more ordinary people, in the context of domestic gardens, executing
reasonably achievable garden projects. In these ways, as Bauman (1987) argues, the
authority figures of gardening have been destabilised and consumer markets actively
showcase the ordinary as a means of securing ever-widening markets. As a result,
ordinariness was awarded a crucial place in garden lifestyle consumer culture in
ways which potentially offered a positive location to the ordinary gardener.
Gardens
The previous section established the idea that ordinariness took on increased
significance in both the contemporary media and in lifestyle consumer culture. Yet
ordinariness, as I argue in previous chapters, is not defined here as belonging only
to women or the working-class; rather, dimensions of the mundane - such as home,
habit and repetition - are shared by people across social variables. Yet ordinariness
is a sphere which is always subjectively located by class, race, sexuality and gender.
The 'ordinary' people of terrestrial lifestyle television for example, as I argued in
'Gardening People', were usually lower middle-class, with working-class people
hardly appearing as its subjects. In this section, I investigate how far the increased
media significance of the 'ordinary' in relation to lifestyle was located by class and
gender. Taking the garden in mid to late 1990s British lifestyle media as the central
focus, I ask: was the ordinary garden, as a lifestyle site where symbolic ideas were
showcased and interpreted for audiences, a classed and gendered space?
In the following section I expand beyond television to analyse a number of
garden lifestyle examples. The aesthetic codes and symbolic repertoires of the
contemporary garden in circulation in the media reveal that there was no one given