Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 112

Keith : Well I think that's how it was done when I was young, I don't think it was too much
that everyone went out and got packets of seeds, you know what I mean, … they used to
swap plants did the neighbours and I think that's where I got it from.

Many of the gardens I visited amongst the working-class respondents were
maintained by labour intensive means which in many cases meant hard physical
work. And the gardeners themselves nurtured the idea that gardening is hard work;

Figure 6.2 Doris's High Standards of Care for her Sieved Soil, 1999

they believe the notion that keeping a garden requires regular laborious maintenance.
This was often taken to quite extraordinary extremes. Doris, for example, actually
gardens the texture of her soil, 'I hoe it, I do hoe. I like hoeing, you know, if there's
been heavy rain it gets a little bit solid.' The close-up in Figure 6.2 shows very
high standards of care taken to dig, weed, hoe and sieve the soil in to a very fine
tilth. Doris was simply not satisfied until her soil resembled a fine crumb. Only
constant, almost daily repetition of hoeing and sieving could produce such large
areas of exposed yet 'crumbed' soil, since airborne seeds would be constantly settling
onto such perfect germination tilth. Sure enough, she gardens daily and spends a
large proportion of time weeding bare earth. Similarly, David builds on the idea of
'worked earth' by actually terming it 'clean earth'. Yet the achievement of 'clean
earth' is extremely labour intensive, and David told me that his soil requires regular
surveillance since open soil 'gets covered in weeds.' And there are other facets of
gardening which require sheer hard work. Jack and Millie for example, invest a lot
of time at particular times of year potting up bedding in tubs. After Keith's industrial
accident he re-designed his garden so that he could easily access his beds, but this