Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 101

out of history' (McGuigan 1999, 72). In this way, the relative importance of certain
events is lost, since history becomes merely a surface area without volume. Instead,
intertextuality dominates postmodernism to produce an endless freeplay of signs
detached from their referents. The result is a 'new depthlessness' since the logic
of intertextuality is that everything, including history, is reduced to textuality. Past
historical moments are deliberately raided, using allusion, imitation and pastiche, to
produce a simulacrum of historical reality. 'The history of aesthetic styles,' Jameson
argues, 'displaces “real” history' (Jameson 1991, 20).
Indeed a consideration of the way in which the garden makeover provided
reference to the historical antecedents of gardening revealed a will to ransack the
surface image of historical styles in a manner which floated free of the depth of
their historical significance. For example, in Homefront in the Garden , Matthew
Vincent explains Anne McKevitt's intention to put a 'contemporary spin on a very
old idea,' - they decide to construct a perspsex ha-ha. The ha-ha was essentially a
large ditch placed at the end of a garden boundary. When the eighteenth century
gardener looked to the garden edge, the ha-ha generated a visual illusion: the
garden merged with the landscape beyond to create a vista while simultaneously
deterring both animal and human undesirables in surrounding fields from entering
the garden. 'Capability Brown copied it from the French,' remarks Vincent, as he
proceeds to illustrate their intention to produce a similar visual effect using perspex
as opposed to a cordon sanitaire . Yet while Vincent's explanation provides a sense
of spurious historicity to the makeover programme, an actual encounter with this
ha-ha would almost certainly amount to a profoundly ahistorical experience. For
these makeover experts the ha-ha is useful as a design concept, interesting because
of its surface appearance. The wider context of its meaning as a signifier of the great
age of gardening is neutralised. In the context of this garden it is no more than an
allusion or an empty textual signifier, as Jameson argues, 'a “connotator” of the past'
(Jameson 1991, 20). Yet while what lies beyond the historical allusion is of little
consequence, the ability to be able to offer a cursory nod at historical knowledge is.
The ability to drop a flattened historical vignette into the commentary on the design
remit is an important signifier of cultural capital. Historical allusion is used as a
means of conferring legitimation and power on those who can couch their choices in
a trajectory of garden history. It was these distinctive poses that the lifestyle media
was concerned to transmit to the new self-conscious middle-class consumer.
Yet as the camera moves away from Matthew Vincent's commentary on the ha-
ha, Tessa Shaw's voice-over introduces the viewer to another re-fashioned signifier
of the past. 'Anne,' we are told, 'had created her version of another classical design
- the walled garden.' Anne's version however, has very little in common with the
walled kitchen garden William Cobbett describes in The English Gardener (1996) in
1829. The ideal design he recommends is for a south-facing, brick walled, rectangular
enclosure which is divided within and provides space for fruit and vegetable plots,
a hot-bed and a tool-house. The walled garden that Cobbett advocates is a working
garden, often owned by country families, which had been tended in the English
countryside for 500 years. Anne McKevitt's version is more akin to an outdoor
living room: its walls are angular, textured and painted in a variety of fashionable
colours and it provides seating and a coffee table as opposed to offering a space to