Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 97

It's just not normal.' For other critics the power of the revealed garden is a result of
the juxtaposition of intense emotion and ordinariness, 'through its close-up on the
reaction of the 'ordinary' person on television' it represents a, 'moment of excess
representative of über -ordinariness' (Moseley 2000, 303).
Jameson presents a fatalistic view of the experience of postmodernism, but one
can see how post-modern codes might appeal to those interested in the playful and
reflexive lifestyle practices Chaney (2001) describes. For stand-alone, educated,
middle-class subjects in post-industrial societies, who have left behind the communal
'way of life', the interpretation of post-modern codes enables the re-fashioning of
new forms of identity. Yet these post-modern middle-class codes resided uneasily
next to the established, traditional forms of middle-class aesthetic advocated by
writers such as Christopher Lloyd, Monty Don and Sir Roy Strong. Post-modern
aesthetics, which rely either on high cultural artistic knowledge of both modernism
and postmodernism or a familiarity with the sanction given to aestheticised objects
by commodity culture, struck a jibe at the patrician 'establishment' aesthetics also
being promulgated by Don in his Observer Life column. After all the makeover
provided spectacular visual spaces which seemed exciting, youthful and hedonistic
in comparison with the rather pedestrian emphasis on the colour, texture and
relationships of form provided by companion planting. In these ways, garden
lifestyle texts not only showcased different kinds of (middle-) class aesthetics which
demonstrated the internal divisions within class groups, they also testified to the
contiguous friction between different factions of a social class at that historical
moment.
The garden looked entirely different in local aspects of the media. For instance,
Howard Drury offers weekly gardening advice in the 'preview' supplement in the
Sunday Mercury , a Birmingham and West Midlands local Sunday newspaper. Howard
Drury's Gardening Diary, a cheaply produced, largely black and white 'special
publication' produced annually, offers the reader a month by month breakdown of
the gardening year, highlighting the seasonal requirements of the garden. Hard sell
advertising for products such as orthopaedic chairs, ceramic tiles, Capo Di Monte and
credit agencies reveal a working- to lower middle-class, white, 'grey' readership.
The magazine offers the reader ways of constructing a practical, sensible garden
space; an aesthetic is provided, but it denies anything which might be regarded as
ostentatious. In this way, the magazine alludes to the kinds of lower middle-class
values which appealed to the British working-class of the 1980s: economic thrift,
hard-work and an ascetic approach to leisure. These key components of the cultural
aspect of Thatcher's brand of conservatism inform the few photographs provided.
The magazine promotes an aesthetic ethos of plain orderliness based on conserving
the respectability of traditional garden elements. Elsewhere the magazine uses close-
up photographs to illustrate the copy in a utilitarian way. Where images of a garden
are provided, the colour scheme is traditionally wrought: outdoor landscaping
materials, such as stone paving flags, creosoted wooden fences and trellises, gravel
pathways, aluminium and glass greenhouses utilise neutral, outdoor colours such
as brown, beige, grey and green. The images draw upon conventional, stock garden
elements such as the lawn, the flower bed containing common shrubs and space
for annual bedding, trees, the shed, the greenhouse, the rockery and pots and