Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 116

Thomas : What we'll try to do in the garden is something that I'm finding now with
woodwork and also buying wine, is that you try to get the best of the type…for example,
we don't just go to the nearest nursery and buy the cheapest plant.
Also in contrast to the working-class gardeners, who embraced the almost daily
routine of garden labour as hard work, the middle-class gardeners discursively
avoided ever referring to gardening as work. The middle-class gardeners I spoke to
tended to gloss over the idea of labour by naming it as some other function, it was
always more than just labour as a means to achieve an end: gardening was 'relaxing'
or 'good exercise', digging was described as 'therapeutic' and Anne and Phoebe said
that they used gardening as a means of 'procrastinating'.
And, unlike the working-class people of this study who were perpetually alerted
to the idea that critical others lay in constant judgement of the order of their gardens,
the middle-class gardeners made absolutely no mention of what other people , at the
local level , might think of them. But it would be a step too far to claim that they
had no care about what some people thought of them: for they demonstrated to me
that they were skilled at the art of display, it was just that they were concerned to
showcase their requisite capitals.
As this section of my study shows, class location made a significant difference to
what everyday gardening means to people. In Bourdieusian terms, the working-class
gardeners of the community had a paucity of legitimate capital assets. Lacking in
formal education, they had virtually no references to cultural capital. The kinds of
legitimate tastes recommended by the journalists of the time, such as Monty Don or
Christopher Lloyd or personality-interpreters such as Anne McKevitt held no real
interest for these gardeners. Antiquated forms of knowledge, such as Latin names
had no place in their everyday lives - indeed these gardeners had no real horticultural
vocabulary through which to express nationally legitimised garden capital. Their
social capital was meagre or non-existent. As a result, their forms of knowledge,
based as they were on local reference points became investments on which they
could trade. These gardeners had built a strong sense of community garden giving;
seeds were swapped and cuttings were exchanged across family, friends, neighbours
and even passers-by. But while these practices had great value at the local level, they
had limited value and were virtually untradeable beyond the immediate community.
In these ways, these working-class people were not intent on accumulating forms of
value to themselves as forms of investment - like the middle-class gardeners did.
Rather, they valued themselves and honoured members of their local community
through dignified forms of gardening labour, through tilling the soil with extremely
high standards of care and through caring about presenting competent, decent selves
through their gardens with a view to making value in the present moment.
Yet while the working-class gardeners had a dearth of nationally legitimised
capitals, local community links were tremendously valuable for the working-class
gardeners. Care, generosity and mutual self help that are extended through routine
garden practices, are characteristics that both Hoggart (1957) and Williams (1989)
sought to value in their historiographies of the working-class in the 1950s. Williams,
for example, saw working-class investment in the community as a positive impetus
against competitive and individualistic middle-class society. And despite Savage's