Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 2

families in higher social groups; and the appeal of independent lifestyle productions
made by women for women prepared them to appreciate, the 'multi-layered
feminization of the 8-9 slot' (Brunsdon 2003, 8). Actually, Brunsdon's descriptions
of women at the time aptly described me: I was watching and enjoying the rather
more cultured makeover programmes of the minority channels such as Homefront
in the Garden (BBC2, 1997-), and looking at the BBC topics that were tied to
television series, such as Gay Search's Instant Gardening (1995) and magazines like
New Eden that were aimed at helping relatively new gardeners to make a start. And
while lifestyling the garden became a central trope in what Gripsrud calls the 'shared
cultural menu' (2004, 213) of terrestrial television in the mid to late 1990s, people
were also doing what the consumer address of lifestyle programmes was urging them
to do: hungrily consuming gardening products in retailing. The garden industry's
political economy expanded and diversified during the period. Specialist nurseries
became retail chains such as Wyevale and Hillier which sold not just plants, but a
host of other products such as topics, gifts, barbecues and outdoor garden furniture.
Indeed, MINTEL (1997) reported a rise in sales of 27 per cent between 1988 and
1993 and spending of £3 billion in 1996 (Bhatti 1999, 188). No wonder Vogue called
gardening 'the new sex' in Spring 1998.
But there were other things occupying my approach to my new garden, which
troubled my thinking about the media images I was looking at during the mid to late
1990s. I began to think back to the garden I had grown up in, back in Yorkshire in
the early 1970s and when I stopped to consider contemporary garden images, from
television and magazines and at the goods that one could buy at the garden centre,
it struck me that council estate gardening in Yorkshire had held something quite
specific. It represented a set of aesthetic ideas, in terms of its plants, how they were
arranged and the garden's landscaping, that simply had no positive place in the mid-
1990s garden culture I had begun to encounter. To pay homage to those aesthetics in
the context of my own garden, I realised, would have been inappropriate, tasteless, a
bad set of cultural choices. Why was this so, I wondered? Where did that lack of fit
between the images I encountered and my own family garden come from? I began
to realise that having access to middle-class images of the garden in the 1990s had
revealed a gap between what had been desirable in Yorkshire in the 1970s and the
culture I now inhabited. In this way, the impetus for the topic started from my life
experience of gardens and from the questions which emanated from the comparisons
I made through my own class travelling form working-class origins to 'becoming',
through education, middle-class. Indeed all the central questions addressed in this
topic come from an autobiographical root, for my own garden learning had come
from affective female familial ties, from my grandmother, my aunt and from my
mother. Did the tastes, preferences and knowledges I had about me in the 1990s
have a specifically female edge? Why did I know about some plants and not others?
How had my own location of class and gender positioned me in relation to garden
culture? Effectively, it was these autobiographical questions which structured the
pivotal questions around the research for the study.
This topic is an empirical study about gardeners and gardening in late 1990s Britain.
It records a specific moment in television, media and cultural history: it is about the
ordinary cultural practise of gardening and its relationship with mediated images of the