Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 121

'we look after it and keep it tidy'; Geoff: 'Oh it is tidy, we like it that way.' Indeed,
the tidiness that I witnessed manifested itself in a number of ways: manicured lawns,
immaculately swept paths (Millie: 'you know soil falls over, you know, I always
sweep up'), totally weed-free crumbed 'clean' earth, tightly clipped hedges and
shrubs shaped into spheres or squares. As you can see in Figure 6.4, some of these
gardeners felt the need to see gaps between plants and shrubs so that they could be
certain there were no stray leaves, no lurking weeds, no soil out of place on a paving
stone, no unruly 'overgrown' plants outstretching their allotted place: in short that
no area of the garden escaped their supervision. Routines of ordinariness were about
these acts of surveillance: of looking, bending and relocating garden elements in to
their rightful places. This made at times for a rather bleak and barren aesthetic. Lawns
scorch if kept too short in summer and plants are clipped into atomised, spherical
shapes between sieved tilth. Indeed there was a marked concern with the texture of
the soil, 'I like to see that the soil's nice and lifted up and aerated, it doesn't want to
be soggy and flat and that with all plants…I like to see a space in between them.
By contrast the middle-class gardeners were conscious of creating a particular
kind of garden. Thomas and Lena claimed that their garden was deliberately designed
to be 'informal' and they described their garden as a 'shrub garden'. Rosemary
and Maud described their garden as 'an English garden - not a formal garden' -
a categorisation which testifies to an understanding of what constitutes a formal
garden within garden history. And while Hugo and Margaret said that their garden
was 'hotch-potchy' they had deliberately chosen to create a herb garden.
There was also a consciousness on their part about the aesthetics of planting and
of the way in which garden features could contribute to an overall aesthetic feel.
Rosemary told me that her planting schemes in the garden came from her knowledge
as a flower arranger, 'So if you look in the garden there's colour, form and texture…
so a lot of the plants are unusual plants because they're there for foliage and for
the colour and for the form.' Figure 6.5 shows the contrasting shrubbery which
characterises their border; note the carefully planned complimentary differences
between foliage and flowers and how knowledge of plant height and depth are
planned to create a staggered border. Rosemary demonstrated a deliberate theme
in terms of the kinds of plants she had chosen to plant, 'we don't grow anything
rigid, we look for soft forms.' In a similar vein Anne and Phoebe, both graduates in
fine art and graphic design respectively saw aesthetic beauty in the old, overgrown
herbs in their garden. Anne described a lavender as 'lovely and overgrown' and
spoke of the 'wonderful texture' of the woody base of the rosemary. More generally
there was more of an emphasis on foliage than on flowers; two or three respondents
commented that the colour of their gardens offered different shades of green.
These gardeners were not interested in using the kinds of garden sculptures or
ornaments that might be purchased in local garden centres as features. But some of
them did value old things - either old features of their houses or old objects and these
acted as garden ornaments. In these ways, antique items lent a sense of history to the
aesthetic feel of middle-class gardens. Anne told me that she had a plaster cast of the
Virgin Mary that was being thrown away after the nativity play at the local church,
which was now positioned in the herb garden. She also has an 'old brazier', 'rusting