Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 105

In her analysis of lifestyle cookery programmes, Strange (1998) argues that in
the mid-1990s cookery experts Keith Floyd and Delia Smith were characterised by
conventionally gendered modes of presentation. Moseley (Brunsdon et al., 2001)
however, uses Jamie Oliver's persona to argue that lifestyle experts, by the late
1990s were beginning to outstep traditional gender roles. In this chapter I argue
that personality-interpreters did represent a more diverse range of voices in terms of
gender, class and age. However, as the example cited in this section shows: there was
still a place within the lifestyle gardening media for highly conventional gendered
images of gardening people, to such an extent that the garden became the epitome
of typically gendered female space. The lifestyle media was prepared to show the
interpretation of lifestyle ideas in 'real' gardens and as an institution it was showing
signs of egalitarian change in terms of the representation of class and gender, but
there was still progress to be made in the terrain of the cultural politics of class and
gender.
Conclusion
My conclusion to chapter 4 argued that the history and location of the ordinary British
garden and its gardeners was almost entirely missing from legislative enclaves. This
chapter has shown that the media was an institutional site that acted progressively
to erode the authority of garden legislators. Ordinary people did have a real stake in
the garden lifestyle media and ordinary gardens had a respectable visual location in
contemporary media texts. In this sense, ordinary people became central to the on-
going construction of a mediated version of garden history. These changes however,
must be seen in the context of the shift from civic to consumer culture Bauman
(1987) describes. The ordinary people that found an embrace in 1990s lifestyle media
were, as Moseley (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 33) describes, ' citizen -consumers'; and
the increased significance of interpretative ideas centred around the ordinary garden
occurred as a result of the elevated authority of the market. These shifts contain an
important caveat: ordinariness, in the 1990s, became an essential component of the
political economy of the media; ordinariness was only embraced within the context
of the popularity of lifestyle in consumer culture.
The 'ordinari-ization' strategies of the garden lifestyle media must be seen
therefore, as part of the endless search the media industries were - and still are
- prepared to make for increased market possibilities. Sentient of the fact that
contemporary culture remains deeply stratified in terms of gender and social class,
the media was, and in the main still has, retained the social locations of ordinariness
for the purposes of efficient marketing and public relations. While garden lifestyle
texts like Homefront in the Garden and Howard Drury's Gardening Diary were
ordinary they were, for the purpose of reaching their intended consuming client
group, classed and gendered products. And as this chapter shows, as conventionally
classed and gendered products they incurred costs for both working-class and female
audiences. National lifestyle texts of the 1990s carried an aversion to working-class
culture and women were encouraged to adopt traditional modes of gendered being.