Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 99

to literary allusions and antiquated knowledge offered a means to display a high
volume of capital. Moreover, through the use of middle-class tastes, as the example
of the imposition of a post-modern design remit on working-class couple Terry and
Joan in Gardening Neighbours illustrates, the media enacted symbolic violence
(Bourdieu 1990) against working-class viewers. Yet legitimate knowledges and
aesthetic codes require recognition based on the 'transferable dispositions' of one's
habitus and on access to forms of capital. In this way, Bourdieu's model enables an
understanding of how class inequalities were perpetuated, since those with meagre
capitals simply could not exploit the pedagogic action of the garden lifestyle media,
hence, they experienced problems in their attempt to accrue, exchange and capitalise
on them. No wonder working-class audiences turned to aspects of the local press for
affirmation of their own local garden aesthetics.
Indeed some forms of cultural and symbolic capital, in a bid to retreat from
legitimate taste, were generated locally. Howard Drury's Garden Diary used different
garden codes and conventions, which arguably functioned to contest legitimate
capital. Yet these local conventions only held value within local settings. At national
level, media institutions had a vested interest in conferring the symbolic power of
middle-class aesthetics. In these contexts, local aesthetic codes were devalued and
their tradeability is therefore limited: they simply lacked the institutional channels
through which to disburse their calls for legitimacy.
In these ways, the 'ordinary garden' of the lifestyle media in the mid to late 1990s
was shot through with classed aesthetics.
The evocation of history in contemporary gardens
Identified as a more culturally extrovert faction of middle-class, the 'new middle-
class' emerged in Britain in the early 1980s (Savage et al. 1992). Critics have
argued that this group is marked by its receptivity to post-modern cultural goods
(Featherstone, 1991). Indeed Savage et al. (1992) identify a 'post-modern' faction
of the British middle-class, which they argue is characterised by its indulgence in a
'wide range of disparate consumption practices' (1992, 130). Even more pertinently,
Savage et al. argue that this group is also marked by its tendency to treat previously
auratic forms of culture in non-auratic ways (ibid.). Hence, they give weight to the
argument I mounted in the previous section: post-modern lifestyle garden aesthetics
offered this new class faction a means to challenge auratic or at least highly legitimate
middle-class garden aesthetics, while allowing them to indulge in the depthless, self-
parodying commercialised art found in lifestyle compartments of consumer culture.
In this section, I argue that the lifestyle media of the time was highly sentient of
the new middle-class and its needs and, acting as guides for living, lifestyle texts
promulgated the idea that the aestheticisation of components of everyday life - such
as the garden - would lead to a more gratifying lifestyle.
Bourdieu (1986) argues that there is a whole swathe of cultural workers devoted
to the production and dissemination of symbolic goods for the expanding new
middle-class. Obsessed with the promotion of appearance, identity and presentation
techniques in occupations such as the media, advertising and public relations, these
workers act as 'new cultural intermediaries', ferreting out new artistic and intellectual