Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 109

Chapter 6
Class, Taste and Gardening
Maud : I couldn't bear to live in a flat and not have access to …
Rosemary : Private land.
John : … whereas some people might 'ave a shit 'ole for a garden … then there's the other
end in't the, what knows all the actual names o' the plants, botanical and all this stuff and
to me that's not fun, that's just overboard.
Lisa : I've had failure with clematis myself.
Margaret : Me too. And then you go past those grotty houses on Heaton Avenue (a road
on the nearby council estate) and see their success and you think, they won't look at it
twice.
Lisa : Have you ever been influenced by gardening programmes?
Doris : Well you've to think of the expense and you can't, can you? There's certain things
that you just can't enter into.
Introduction
This chapter empirically examines how people occupy and inhabit the social and
cultural positions of class. Keeping ordinary practices and aesthetics at the forefront
of the analysis, it asks if the garden is a site where identities of class are played
out and if gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned
by class. I address these questions by attending to the facets identified by Felski's
(2000) phenomenological approach to ordinariness in everyday life: its temporality
through 'repetition', its grounding at 'home' and its rhythms of 'habit'.
I argue in this topic that while ordinariness has been examined in relation to
consumption practices (Gronow and Warde 1999) and with regard to class identities
(Savage 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2005) in sociological work, it has a history of
being somewhat maligned in cultural studies, despite the commitment to ordinary
people left by the legacy of early culturalism. Accounts of the history of the formation
of cultural studies argue that there seems to have been no real attempt to get in touch
with the grass-roots, lived vagaries and nuances of the humdrum, mundane aspects
of ordinary peoples' lives (Murdock 1997; Walkerdine 1997). While at the CCCS
the initial focus was on class formations, there is no evidence that anybody really
attempted to build an organic working relationship either with working-class people
or with the existing labour movement. Indeed the focus on class during the 1980s