Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 98

hanging baskets. The only full colour photograph which focuses on a plant display
shows a summer flower bed arranged in blocks of white and pink bedding plants
consisting of begonias, pelargoniums (geraniums) and impatiens. There are no
spectacular constructions, no novelty themes, no bright colours and no structural
references to transnationality. Within the pages of this advice supplement, the reader
is encouraged by the personal address of Howard the author to focus down on the
essential information, the plants themselves. Thus, the simply conceived advice
sections, 'The lawn' and 'The vegetable garden', for example - steer the reader
away from what might be seen as the ostentatious excesses of consumption towards
a moderate conception of how a garden should be practically constructed. In these
ways, Drury's recommendations have nothing in common with the national codes
of Observer Life or Homefront in the Garden. Based on plain orderliness, sincere
tidiness and respectable traditional garden elements, Drury's garden is generated
locally using local aesthetic visual codes.
These examples show that while ordinary people were given an identification
point by aspects of the media which use the ordinary domestic garden as a setting
for interpreting lifestyle ideas, the garden was a classed space at the level of
representations.
Internal antagonisms within the middle-class were illustrated by the differences
between the traditional, educated and somewhat staid middle-class aesthetics
embodied by garden writers such as Monty Don and the new middle-class who
were receptive to the post-modern cultural goods and experiences offered by the
makeover. The middle-class consists of dominant and subordinate factions who, 'are
engaging in endless though reasonably genteel battles to assert their own identities,
social positions and worth' (Savage et al. 1992, 100). Bourdieu (1986) reminds
us that the upwardly aspirant 'new petite bourgeoisie' keeps discovering that the
social field it wishes to have more purchase upon is already dominated by a more
patrician, long-standing middle-class generation and in a bid to mark new territory,
'previously well-established cultural traditions are thus increasingly treated in a
'pastiche' way' (Savage et al. 1992, 128). Concomitantly, in counter-response, those
higher in cultural capital struggle to ensure that 'culture' remains autonomously
scarce and exclusive and intellectuals attempt to find ways to maintain the value of
their specialised knowledge. In this way, Bourdieu's work enables one to understand
the specific class context from which different aesthetic modes of lifestyle emanate.
It also shows the on-going struggle between the culturally more outgoing and the
more respectable and conformist factions of the British middle-class in late 1990s
British culture.
Moreover, Bourdieu's (1986) economistic metaphors show that the national
media deployed techniques as a means to institutionalise particular forms of capital.
As the examples from Observer Life , Garden Neighbours and Homefront in the
Garden show, it was middle-class gardening tastes, competencies and aesthetics
which were ordained as legitimate by the national media. Not everyone had the
resources to enable them to access the display of middle-class taste in the media.
Yet the garden lifestyle media sanctioned the symbolic power of the middle-class
as the primary arbiter of symbolic capital. Monty Don for example, constructed
a resoundingly middle-class presence in his Observer Life column; his reference