Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 124

Indeed there were other aesthetic choices that middle-class gardeners made that
testified to a deliberate will to reject working-class garden practices. In direct contrast
to the desire for clean earth to be on show, the middle-class gardeners concurred
on the need to encourage plants to cover the soil. Thomas used pseudo-scientific
language to describe what he called his 'close bostitch system' 1 of allowing plants to
grow until their tips were touching. Indeed, bare earth is the enemy of the middle-
class gardener, as Phoebe told me, 'it wants covering with plants.'
Rather the emphasis in these gardens is on an aesthetics of 'informality' which
means allowing plants to find their 'natural way'. Plants, I was told, should run into
each other and spill out over lawns, shrubs should be allowed to grow into the form
nature intended them to take and if leaves fall so be it. Rosemary and Maud's catmint
for example, spilled over their lawn. Alongside that these gardeners wanted their
garden to be 'absolutely full'. And these gardeners know what they don't want their
gardens to look like. For example, Rosemary and Maud were very clear that they did
not have a rockery - another undesirable working-class trope - in their garden. In the
following exchange, I mistakenly identified a rockery, but I was roundly corrected:
Lisa : And you've got rockery areas, haven't you? Like this for example (gesturing out
through the patio doors).
Rosemary : Not really, it's a retaining wall. It's not really a rockery.
Lisa : Ok.
Rosemary : If you're looking at a rockery, it's not that.
As I looked out at the garden, I was asked to re-position my thinking so as to recognise
the more desirable 'retaining wall' in front of me. In fact, at Rosemary and Maud's I
was invited during the garden tour, to compare their desirably chosen (middle-class)
garden with their neighbours' undesirable garden which could be seen by looking
carefully through the border. The difference, as Rosemary outlines and as Figure 6.6
illustrates, lies in the use of garden aesthetics:
Lisa : So what you're saying is that you don't trim everything into a particular shape,
you're not interested in making everything pristine
Rosemary : Well look at next door's.
Maud : (laughs)
Rosemary : …and you've no form. You go out there and have a look. There's no form.
Now a tree isn't rounded like a ball.
Lisa : So you're saying that you work with natural forms and you put them together and
allow them to work.
1 While I have never heard of the term 'bostitch system', Thomas used it to refer to the
practice of close planting to keep weeds out of the garden.