Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 110

and early 1990s took the form of an intense analysis of the hegemonic appeal of
Thatcherite Toryism and its effective construction of 'authoritarian populism', rather
than on how 'real' people occupied the social and cultural positions of class during
that time (Milner 1999). Studies about class it would seem, have fought shy of the
attempt to understand the truly mundane elements of the everyday life of working-
class people. What cultural studies has tended to do instead, according to Walkerdine
(1997), is to concentrate on resistance and subcultural ritual in a way which has
tended to reproduce the idea that only the politically conscious working-class are
worthy of interest. Consequently, as Murdock argues the,
focus on refusal and non-compliance left little room for an extended analysis of caution
and conservatism. In the cultural studies' hall of mirrors the centre became the margin. As
a result it was unable to offer a convincing account of continuity and inertia. It was strong
on disruption but weak on reproduction (Murdock 1997, 180).
In this chapter, rather than treating those who conform to the rituals of ordinariness as
worthless and uninteresting, I want to explore forms of culture that are not politically
subversive, spectacular or exotic. I am interested in how 'classed' subjects live,
survive and get by in the complexities of common practices like gardening. Intrigued
by what the ordinary people of this study have to say about ordinariness as a truly
mundane entity, I ask what role the endlessly repeated humdrum rituals and habits of
gardening, located in a place called home, play in the formation of classed identities?
The chapter is divided in to two sections: the first asks what gardening means to
people and the following section explores aesthetic dispositions. Each section takes
each class group in turn.
'I Like T' Compliments at T'End at T'Day': What Gardening Means
One of the key sites where cultural capital is located is in the language of gardening.
The working-class gardeners I interviewed had a limited horticultural vocabulary.
They lacked access to the cultural capital of gardening knowledge which meant
that they would be unlikely to trade what they knew as an asset beyond the local
level. Doris referred to shrubs as 'bushes'. Keith called perennials 'per-annuals'.
Doris was only able to recall some of the common names of plants, for example
'red hot pokers'. Keith kept referring to the plants he was interested in as 'eye-
catching', which became a euphemism for plant varieties that he either could not
or did not feel the need to reference. Most of these gardeners did not possess
the capital which inheres within particular forms of gardening knowledge; and if
they had scant capital they tended not to recognise that it might have legitimacy.
They were therefore unable to convert what meagre capital they had into symbolic
capital.
For these gardeners, there was an awareness of the impact of gardening practices
on the local community and alongside that a wish to please and to some extent to serve
and bend to others wherever possible. Keith removed his privet hedge and replaced
it with patterned blocks, partly because the privets were pushing his walls over,
but also so that local drivers could safely see on-coming traffic at the t-junction on