Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 102

grow food. The experience of history in these gardens is based on the juxtaposition
of different ephemeral, fleeting moments: from the ha-ha to the modern patio to the
walled garden. Historical chronology or development was a moribund concept in the
typical garden makeover: as post-modern spaces these designers felt free to quote
images of history in any order they choose. Yet the ability to choose from a body of
historical knowledge, no matter how superficially it is retrieved, confers power on
the beholder. Such references may lack depth, but they stamp the authority of history
on to the garden. As such these programmes worked to show the potential consumer
how to use a sense of history as a means to legitimate taste.
One can see the same kind of strategy in the glossy monthly magazine Gardens
Illustrated published in Spring 2001 . Here a sense of garden history is pivotal to the
entire magazine, from the features about historic gardens to the commodities which
imitate objects from the past. A feature entitled 'Playing tag', for example, offers
the reader a series of photographs of potted bulbs and herbs in order to showcase a
variety of plant labels currently on the market. These labels are evocative of various
moments in garden history: 'Victorian hanging alitag'; 'antique small and large glass
and aluminium alitags'; 'steel “tournefort” label' are examples. Most of them, as in
the case of a verdigris copper tag which can be purchased from The Conran Shop,
offer a pre-designed patina. They offer the consumer the opportunity to venerate
the garden with a sense of antiquity. Such features tutor the reader about the newest
symbolic goods and they offer interpretations of how history can generate cultural
capital in the garden.
In these ways, one can see that the lifestyle media acted as a commercial site
where personality-interpreters use the garden as a space for interpreting new, yet
classed symbolic lifestyle ideas. For the new middle-class, however, 'cultural
assets need not depend on the legitimacy offered by the state. Cultural assets can
be deployed and valorised in the market' (Savage et al. 1992, 129-130). In this way
the media acted as a commercial guarantor for the value of new positional goods.
This section has shown how garden history can be interpreted in the garden in ways
which confer power on to their beholders. Lash (1990) argues that the middle-class
use symbols as a substitute for things, enabling them to 'produce symbols which
help realise the value of other symbols' (Lash 1990, 251). In this way, the lifestyle
media shows consumers how to use distinctive historical symbols as forms of power
and as a means to make the garden a legitimate middle-class space.
Gardens as an extension of the self
So far this section has shown that lifestyle ideas are always classed. This section
illustrates that the ordinary lifestyle garden is also shot through with symbolic ideas
about gender as well as class.
One of the conventions of the late 1990s British makeover was to extend the
indoors outdoors; a typical characteristic of the 'reveal' for example, is that the patio
area has been transformed into an 'outdoor lounge'. Yet makeover gardens were
often more than just an extension of the home interior, they were also, in many cases,
shown to become an extension of the self. A convention of the makeover involved
finding out about the personality of the makeover subject, so that the garden can