Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Ordinary Gardening
About the topic
Picture the scene. It is 1992 and I've just become a first-time homeowner with my
partner somewhere in Cheshire. The house was built in 1904 and there is work to
be done. It has a long back garden and a medium sized front, but the truth is that
we don't really know what to do with it. At the same time, because we teach media
studies in higher education we watch quite a lot of terrestrial television, where the
garden is enjoying some popularity, and I'm partial to the lifestyle section of the
weekend broadsheet press. We settle in, the garden slides over to me on the ledger of
domestic responsibilities and then as I start to think about 'what to put in', the whole
idea of the garden as media representation, as space and as a cultural practise starts
to make me think.
And that is where the seed of this topic really began. Faced with the question
of what to do with a ready-made ordinary
1
domestic garden, a host of personal
considerations about home-making began to meld together with some of my long-
held interests. At this time the garden was receiving an enormous increase in media
coverage, gardening magazines, such as
Gardeners' World
, which was launched in
1991, had a circulation of 272, 000 and a 1.5 million readership by 1994, and there
were a number of other successful titles such as
Practical Gardening
(Bhatti 1999,
188)
.
The garden was also a prominent facet of 'lifestyle' television, the genre which
has been labelled, 'the genre of the nineties' (Medhurst 1999). Television scholars
had begun to notice a definite shift in the UK 1990s terrestrial schedules from the
'hard' programming of current affairs and documentaries to softer, hobbyist lifestyle
programming of home interiors, cookery and gardening (Brunsdon et. al. 2001;
Moseley 2000). Makeover popularity was at its height in the late 1990s, indeed
the schedules were subject to what Brunsdon has called a, 'day for night makeover
takeover' (2003, 7). Wider socio-political trends inform why lifestyle television was
so popular during the period: the expansion in home-ownership in the UK (Bhatti
1999) alongside a general trend towards increased lifestyling in British culture were
set against the backcloth of an aspirational atmosphere of New Labour's 'things
can only get better' campaign. Concomitantly, Brunsdon argues that factors such as
women's continued contribution to the work force; the deferral of the first child in
