Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 123

were encouraged to have their form and in return covering the ground meant that
gardeners did not have to spend hours policing the garden for weeds.
Bourdieu (1986) argues that the middle-class makes deliberate moves to distance
itself from working-class practices and aesthetics, such moves are inherent in
practices of social distinction. And as Savage (2000b) argues, even though people
are more ambivalent about their class identity, class is still used as a measuring
device to 'place' people and it affects peoples' approach to others. In line with
these arguments, tidiness - recognised as an undesirable practice - was spurned
by my middle-class respondents precisely because of its association with gardens
in working-class districts. Indeed on one occasion, I witnessed an act of symbolic
violence as Maud and Rosemary talked about their scorn for tidy gardens in the
presence of Doris, who strives daily for an impeccably tidy garden:
Maud : We've some friends whose gardens are just like their houses. Nothing out of place.
Too tidy.
Lisa : Right…
Maud : (laughs) You've got that. (laughs) We'll never be like that. You're not one are you?
(looking at Doris who doesn't reply - laughs)
Rosemary : They dust and sweep them.
Lisa : Are you not so interested in being tidy?
Maud : Have a look around.
Rosemary : We're doers (laughs).
Maud : We've had to move all these papers (meaning newspapers).
Rosemary : Well if you plant to run into each other the weeds can't grow can they? If
you've open land you've got to keep weeding. And if you have hot summers then the
water evaporates from the open land.
Rosemary and Maud, confident about the legitimation of their own garden aesthetics
feel quite at ease talking about the kinds of (working-class) aesthetics they never
wish to be associated with - 'we'll never be like that.' Using their pedagogic
authority, they recognise that anxious tidiness has no tradeable value. And at the
point in the interview where Maud asks Doris, 'you're not one are you?' was a
particularly painful moment, since Doris, is precisely 'one' of those working-class
gardeners that Maud and Rosemary wish to distance themselves from. Doris surely
felt embarrassment and pain in recognition that her own tastes were being devalued.
She knew that to foreground her gardening style would not engender approval and
in acknowledgement of her own lack of gardening knowledge she chose to keep
silent. In these ways symbolic violence operates in the most mundane settings to
mark the dominance and desirability of middle-class cultural values and to stamp out
working-class tastes as unthinkable.