Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 93

set of lifestyle garden aesthetics: the magazine Organic Gardening for example,
displayed a very different aesthetic vision of gardening from that which characterised
the makeovers of Ground Force . There were multiple differences between the ways
in which the ordinary garden could be made to look, differences which reveal that
the British gardening public was conceived by the media industries as a socially
fragmented audience. A post-modern perspective would imply that this signified the
relative freedom people had to identify and access a range of different conceptions
of constructing a desirable garden look. Post-modern theories, which imply
playfulness, freedom of entry and fluidity of movement, tend to assume that people
can traverse the social boundaries in which they are located. This topic, however,
uses Bourdieu's (1986) economistic metaphors to ask whether barriers to entry based
on the variable distribution of cultural, social and economic capital impacted on the
kind of gardening aesthetic people were able to generate. And while post-modern
approaches imply that men and women are able to traverse gender boundaries, I
examine the makeover genre as a means to assess if the media encouraged the fluidity
of subversive gendered constructions. Acknowledging that the ordinary mediated
garden was a space where more ordinary people were embraced, I ask if they were
still subjectively placed by symbolic nuances of class and gender. Did the shift from
civic to consumer culture (Bauman 1987) and from ways of life to lifestyle (Chaney
2001) remain underpinned by societal class and gender locations?
In the first section I examine the visual look and address of three classed modes
of lifestyle garden aesthetics: the national weekend lifestyle press, the makeover and
the local Sunday gardening supplement. In the second, I examine how evocations
of garden history were used as a means to guide a 'new middle-class' audience in
the selection of particular garden aesthetics in the makeover. And finally, arguing
that garden spaces in the climate of the mid to late 1990s were used as spaces to
communicate symbolic ideas about their owners, I ask how far the lifestyled garden
was a classed and gendered space.
The aesthetics of the contemporary garden
Solid, traditional middle-class commentary on garden aesthetics was subtly explicated
in Monty Don's Sunday gardening column in the Life supplement of the Observer.
Like most contemporary lifestyle interpreters, Don avoids a directly instructional
approach to gardening. Rather, he implies that the practice of effective gardening
can only be understood by adopting a liberal humanist approach to the arts, from
the highbrow (literature, painting and music) to the middlebrow (photography). As
a result, Don's column is frequently strewn with cultural references and allusions.
For example, an October piece about apples entitled, 'Cider with the roses' alludes
to the writer Laurie Lee. More specifically, Don loosely adopts a quasi-Keatsian
perspective both in relation to his own journalistic style and as a guide to gardening
appreciation. Implied in this approach is the idea that aesthetic understanding can be
acquired through the development of a sensuous appreciation of beauty. For Don, the
creation of a garden is about being quintessentially alert to one's own senses. 'Last
night,' begins his apples column, 'I jogged around the Herefordshire lanes and came
home almost drunk with the scent of apples. Every breath was a slug of strong cider,