Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 122

Figure 6.5 Contrasting Shrubbery in Rosemary and Maud's Garden

nicely' in to a 'beautiful orange'. The antique authenticity of these objects finds a
welcome place in these gardens.
For these gardeners certain plants are valued, others are not. Among the plants
that are esteemed were perennials such as delphiniums, herbs, particular flowering
shrubs and certain bulbs 'tulips, crocuses, aconites, snowdrops, species crocus,
grandiflora crocus' (Rosemary). None of the middle-class gardens I visited showed
any investment in bedding plants and such plants went unmentioned, indeed for
some of them there was a continual insistence that bedding plants were undesirable.
'We don't bed out' I was told by Rosemary, 'life's too short to be bedding out.'
These gardens were not tidy, in fact tidiness was scorned by some of these
gardeners. Anne commented:

Anne : I don't like particular cultivated things, I like a garden to look like a garden and not
be all patches and crisp.

Lisa : So you're not bothered about tidiness?

Anne : No, no, definitely not, I like rusty bits of metal in the garden.

Similarly Rosemary and Maud quite clearly wished to dissociate themselves from
tidy gardening. Rosemary and Maud had areas of the garden where bits of garden
equipment were simply left in fairly haphazard piles, in effect, niches of regulated
untidiness. In line with this there was a denial or a de-emphasis on gardening labour;
these gardeners were unconcerned that there were some untidy niches and plants