Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 117

(2000b) argument that people no longer feel themselves to belong to a class in a
collective sense, the collective capacity to generate shared practices - of swapping
plants, or consideration of the impact of their planting schemes or hard landscaping
on the wider community - is still alive in working-class enclaves of contemporary
British culture. Locally generated practices of giving and contributing to the
community using gardening was a valued competence.
But while some ordinary habits and routines were experienced positively, the
habits formed in response to the upkeep of the garden, and its attendant practices
of daily tidying, were indicative of more deeply felt anxieties. Given the history
of how the working-class have been perceived and represented historically (see
chapter 2) - as a degenerate, fecund, savage and irresponsible mass - this should not
surprise us. My study reveals that these gardeners were well aware of the pejorative
associations potential onlookers harboured about the capability and worth of the
working-class and they fought a battle to keep such associations at bay. As my
ethnographic evidence shows, for my respondents, the look - particularly of the
front garden - acts as a tangible signifier of both the home interior and value and
capability of the people inside. In response to the need to strive for respectability,
ordinary gardening routines were devoted to the perpetual maintenance of a tidy,
ordered garden. Keeping the garden tidy was repeatedly mentioned as a desirable
entity by the working-class gardeners. Leaving the garden uncultivated generates
powerful emotions; to be sure, the will to dis-identify with members of the working-
class who 'can't be bothered' generates powerful emotions, 'if I've left it,' Stephanie
told me, 'I've been ashamed.' Therefore many of the routines of ordinary gardening,
for the working-class men and women of my study, were born out of a sense of
anxiety and insecurity to both refuse pejorative associations about being working-
class and to ensure that others recognise their respectability. Indeed as the following
section demonstrates, ordinary routines of tidiness even took on an aesthetic function
for the working-class gardener.
On the other hand, gardening for middle-class respondents was a pursuit into
which they made high investments, especially in relation to cultural and social capital.
Several of my middle-class respondents, for example, were retired teachers or they
had university qualifications; they were therefore already endowed with measures of
institutionalised cultural capital. More pertinently, they were often able to generically
extend their knowledges out to the garden: one respondent - a retired biology teacher
from the local grammar school was able to speak with authority about the reproductive
features of plants; another, a fine art graduate, was able to carry her knowledge of
the most consecrated compartment of the arts qualifications - art history - to her
choice and consumption of decorative garden ornaments. And the ease with which
they drew on Latin nomenclature showed that these respondents used their habitus
to recognise the power which inheres in certain forms of knowledge and how it
should be displayed. The language and advice of those with legitimate garden tastes
in the media - writers such as Christopher Lloyd, whose journalism always uses
the Latin before the common plant name - was accessible to these gardeners. They
were in possession of social capital: they were members of horticultural societies
and national floristry training schools and they took care to purchase plants and
seeds through specialist outlets or botanical societies. In one interview encounter