Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 120

in their own gardens, their answers testified to a reluctance to break the gardening
patterns established by the rest of the local neighbourhood. As Keith's comments
below show, there is a collective agreement on where vegetables are locally placed
in his area: to break this code is to offend local sensibilities:
Keith : If there was more area around the back here I think more people might be tempted
to grow vegetables but I think with it being a row of terraced and everybody has a garden
and you tend to sort of fit in with everybody else.
Lisa : And you wouldn't want to grow veg in the front garden?
Keith : Well no I don't, I mean it may be unsightly to some people. They might think,
“What a strange place to put them.”
But the most important aesthetic to the working-class gardeners, which became
a constant feature, was that above all else a garden must be tidy. Millie repeatedly
refers to the importance of keeping the garden 'just so'. For her the compliments she
receives are predicated upon the garden's tidiness, 'Oh they comment yes, because
it's nice and tidy. I like it to be kept looking tidy.' Keith told me, 'I like to have it neat
and tidy,' and that his wife 'likes to see a nice tidy garden'. For Doris tidiness is an
imperative, 'you know, you think, “Oh I'd better have it nice and tidy”.' The fact that
the tidiness of her garden had been noticed was a source of great pride, of a passing
neighbour, she told me: 'he says, “This is the tidiest piece of Westcliffe Road”,
He always used to say that.' Indeed keeping the garden tidy became an endlessly
repeated mantra: John: 'we like it to be tidy'; Stephanie: 'It's tidy, it's tidy'; Philip:
Figure 6.4 'Clean Earth' Between the Plants, 1999