Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 118

for example, I was told by Maud that a solicitor had encouraged their father to join
the Northern Horticultural Society. This kind of detail, carefully hammocked around
our discussion of society membership, confers and slightly increases the volume of
social capital owned by the speaker. These gardeners had social capital, but they
were also very keen to ensure that I should recognise it - as this search to bolster
social capital illustrates. Nonetheless, the middle-class gardeners understood that
their endowments in the visible outdoor space between the house and the road would
be reconvertible to the most powerful species of capital - symbolic capital. This
meant that their garden assets were acknowledged as socially distinctive at the local
level, but also that they were recognised and valued as national assets beyond the
reach of the local community.
Indeed at the local level, the middle-class gardeners were uninterested in the idea
of ordinary community activities at the micro level. They never mentioned giving
or swapping plants or of gardening beyond their own gardens. Indeed the only local
gardening activities they invested in were institutionalised by being linked to club
membership. In the case of my study this took the form of the Spen Valley Flower
Club , a society organised and governed by middle-class gardeners and flower
arrangers Rosemary and Maud. The kinds of events which were available - flower
arranging events and competitions, visits to historic gardens and 'lunches' - reflected
conservative middle-class tastes and pursuits; indeed, membership promoted a form
of local social capital. In relation to their own gardens, however, the middle-class
gardeners seemed untouched by the idea that their practices impacted on others.
Several of them were more concerned with the idea that the garden was a private
space and the right to privacy - linked as it is to the idea of the private ownership
of assets - has always been a preserve belonging to the bourgeoisie (Savage et al.
1992). Hence Rosemary and Maud considered their land to be 'private' and the
gardeners I spoke to constructed their gardens as private spaces. As Phoebe told me;
'because the garden is overlooked on two sides, it needed breaking up to become
more secluded.' Already endowed with middle-class confidence, these middle-class
gardeners were free from the anxiety of continually tidying the public space between
the public road and their house, for they were already in comfortable possession of
what the working-class gardeners strove hard to secure: respectability.
'It's Just Neat and Tidy and a Bit of Colour': Aesthetic Dispositions
When I asked the working-class gardeners if they were attempting to generate a
particular garden ethos which might in some way tie in with the look of the house
- I asked, for example, if they were attempting to create a 'cottage-garden feel' (see
Appendix 1), it was in many cases as though I had asked a question about a possibility
that had never occurred to them. They lacked the cultural capital which would have
enabled them to draw on historical and architectural knowledges as a means to 'place'
their houses and their gardens accordingly. As a consequence, they were denied
the competencies required to design or generate a garden in keeping with planting
schemes or features which displayed a knowledge of historical design antecedents.