Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 107

The old staples continue: Gardener's World has remained a perennial; as has Radio
4's Gardener's Question Time. The weekend press both nationally, in say The
Guardian's supplement Weekend and regionally in newspapers like The Yorkshire
Post, still carry their features which contain lifestyle projects and both new and old
gardening experts. Rather, it was that production slowed down, garden lifestyle for
a time was televised as repeats in daytime and some evening scheduling, and was
moved to satellite and digital channels from the early to mid 2000s. Garden lifestyle
makeovers are now rare - a recent exception is Channel 5's independently produced
Nice House, Shame About the Garden (Shine, 2005-). And the move to lifestyle/
reality formats is illustrated by Monty Don's attempt to break substance abuse by
involving a group of drug-users in the on-going production of a working vegetable
garden in Growing Out Of Trouble (BBC2, 2006-). Here the transformation of a land
plot is melded together with the emotional highs and lows of keeping the team on
the straight and narrow. So the garden, as a trope in British hobbyist culture is still
located in traditional quarters; it is just not the lifestyle flavour of the month, rather
- as Growing Out of Trouble illustrates - it is subject to the same generic principles
as other lifestyle/reality formats.
Concomitantly garden centre retailing has contracted. According to MINTEL's
latest report (2007), the market in garden products has declined in value since a peak
in 2003. Estimated spending on garden products in 2002 stood at 5.65 £bn compared
to a 10 per cent fall to 5.14 £bn in 2007. There has been a decline in spending around
manufactured garden goods such as furniture, buildings and equipment, while the
market for growing stock has remained steady - 'buoyed by a trend back towards
“grow your own”' (MINTEL, 2007). This change may indicate the lack of what
MINTEL (2001) named the 'Charlie Dimmock effect' of retailing and its relationship
to television in the mid to late 1990s.
Yet more interesting, is the question of how the garden will be represented in
future television programming. My argument about mid to late 1990s lifestyle was
that while ordinary people were embraced as part of a mediated contemporary
form of garden history - working-class aesthetics were marginal and working-class
people and women were still subject to traditional forms of representation. However,
recent garden programming has acted to contest arguments I have made both in this
topic and elsewhere (see Taylor, 2005) about how ordinary, working-class aesthetics
had no place as valued practices in national television programming in the 1990s.
Christine's Garden (BBC2, 2006-) for example, a 30 minute programme televised
before Gardener's World on BBC2 in 2006, is about an ordinary middle-aged
Lancastrian women who is incredibly enthusiastic about her own garden. Christine
Walkden, a woman who clearly has no interest in performing conventional femininity
for the camera, talks the viewer through her weekly ongoing pottering and seasonal
projects; she is also shown as a gardener steeped in her local community, exchanging
plants, skills and favours with her gardening neighbours in her street. Even more
interestingly, the programmes are made at what Brunsdon has termed the 'realist
end' of lifestyle programming (2003, 18), in that they make a slight return to the
instructional by showing, at some points in real time, Christine helping to cut down a
clematis for a neighbour or waiting indoors for a shower to pass before she can begin
gardening again. The arguments I made about late 1990s national programming are