Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 119

They had no sense of aiming towards a particular garden ethos or reference point,
indeed James said that he had 'no plan' the garden was 'haphazard'.
In terms of planting and plant preferences these gardeners shared a love of
bedding plants; clearly prized, they were always mentioned first as the plants that
were repeatedly purchased and always appreciated. Often these were used in the
garden or there was a tendency to use them in hanging baskets and tubs, Figure 6.3
for example, shows a line of bedding plants in tubs in James's garden, an aesthetic
feature typical of the working-class garden. One of the reasons why these plants
were valued was because they provided a lot of colour as well as a range of different
colours for the garden. The use of multi-colour, or placing all colours alongside each
other, or as Millie described it using 'colour bunched together' was also an aesthetic
tendency. Indeed while the gardeners clearly used other plants such as perennials and
shrubs, as plants which contributed to planting schemes, they were rarely mentioned
with the same enthusiasm as bedding plants.
Figure 6.3 A Typical Working-Class Aesthetic Feature: James's Bedding
Plants in Tubs, 1999
Lacking nationally legitimated historical knowledges about garden design, the
working-class gardeners tended to design their gardens in ways which 'fitted in'
with the rest of the street. In this way, they used the shared aesthetic codes which
had been generated locally as a reference for their own design plans. As identified by
the early culturalists, the working-class gardeners still held on to locally produced
shared practices and collective meanings with regard to their garden designs. When I
asked these gardeners what they didn't like or what they would never consider doing