Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 94

… not enough is made of how smell is such a feature of the countryside, from the
fetid sweetness of the May blossom and the chaffy greenness of haymaking…' (Don
1997, 56). Elsewhere, sight becomes the privileged sense, '…a wigwam of purple
sweet peas, the occasional iridescent petal back lit against the sky like a butterfly
wing.' Similarly, the tactile quality of plants is likened to, 'a kind of delicate floral
Braille' (Don 1998, 38). Thus, according to Don, the ability to distinguish beauty
leads to an understanding of the visual language of gardening.
The extreme close-up photographs which accompanied Don's copy, most often
supplied by acclaimed photographer Fleur Oldby, work in tandem with Don's
sensuous recommendations. Instructional, literal images of plants in situ are avoided
in favour of the more subtle visual strategy of allowing the reader to survey the
finite, detailed minutiae of the colour, form and texture of plants. Just as Don's
column has more to do with the act of writing as opposed to practical gardening,
Oldby's illustrations are about enjoying the visual play that plant close-ups allow
the photographer to access. Gardening aesthetics, within the pages of Don's middle-
class weekend supplement begin with a cultivated state of mind which is attuned to
arts appreciation. The visual organisation of the garden it is implied, is the natural
addendum to a cultured approach to lifestyle. In these ways, Observer Life offers a
traditionally educated, patrician middle-class, yet specifically English approach to
the garden as a lifestyle space.
Other middle-class enclaves of the media demanded some kind of knowledge of
contemporary visual codes. It is virtually impossible to discuss the visual aesthetics of
the garden makeover without setting the idea against the backcloth of postmodernism.
A number of central features characterise accounts of postmodernism in the arts:
the obliteration of meaning as a result of the prominence of design and aesthetics;
the stylistic tendency towards eclecticism and the juxtaposition of visual codes; the
decomposition of the staunch distinction between high and popular culture; and
parody, irony, playfulness, intertextuality and a celebration of the depthlessness
of cultural forms (Featherstone 1991; Rojek 1995). A glance at the typical garden
makeover of the time reveals an explicit correlation between the visual composition
of these gardens and the stylistic features of postmodernism. These kinds of playful,
reflexive codes appeal to the destabilised social subjects discussed by Chaney (2001).
Stand-alone post-modern subjects, as Chaney (2001) describes, are more open to the
new symbolic repertoires required by lifestyle projects.
The post-makeover garden was a space that above all had been subjected to the
principles of design aesthetics. The decomposition of meaning through the prominence
of design was a key strand of thought among post-modern writers. Jameson argues
that post-modern culture was characterised by superficiality: 'depth,' he argues, 'is
replaced by surface' (Jameson 1991, 12). In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989),
Harvey discusses the shift in the conception of space from urban modern planning
to post-modern design :
Whereas the modernists see space as something to be shaped for social purposes and
therefore always subservient to the construction of a social project, the postmodernists
see space as something independent and autonomous, to be shaped according to aesthetic
aims and principles which have nothing necessarily to do with any overarching social