Agriculture Reference
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used in quantity in order to maximise the sensation of colour. And, almost in direct
opposition to the middle-class aesthetic, plants were subordinate to the whims of
the gardener: the working-class aesthetic was about managing the form of shrubs
and trees to ensure that there was no danger of 'take over'. Rather than allowing
the natural form of plants to proliferate, some of these gardeners drew on a manner
of clipping shrubs or plants into tight shapes. In the realm of aesthetics, the people
of my study simply lacked the capital assets to recognise or access the resources
required to accrue legitimate capital. Alongside the sensationalist abundance of
colour, the working-class gardeners tended to lay emphasis on garden practices
which made the best of what they had. Keeping the garden tidy by weeding, clearing
leaves, hoeing the soil, sweeping paths or raking the tilth are practices which make
few demands on economic resources. At the same time, they are also activities which
overlaid the garden with signs of care and decency; indeed as Bourdieu argues in
relation to working-class aesthetics, the garden took on a moral function for these
gardeners. Their garden habitus was akin to the approach described by Bourdieu
in Distinction ; the French working-class lifestyle was based on 'a virtue made of
necessity' (Bourdieu 1984, 177). Unable to make outward investments which accrue
capital beyond the local, they turned to investments that the middle-class gardeners
could already guarantee as a given: respectability. Neat and tidy order, having the
garden, 'just so' as several of my respondents described, was a means to keep the
garden respectable, for as Skeggs argues:
Respectability is usually the concern of those who are not seen to have it…It is rarely
recognised as an issue by those who are positioned with it, who are normalised by it, and
who do not have to prove it. Yet for those who feel positioned by and position themselves
against the discourse of respectability it informs a great deal of their responses (Skeggs
1997, 1).
For working-class people, as Skeggs asserts, respectability becomes a form
of symbolic capital at the local level. Tidiness, an entity which all my working-
class respondents valued, was an index of respectability. Generating order, having
everything observably neat and tidy was an important element in the working-class
aesthetic garden vocabulary. It was one of the (working-class) aesthetic practices
which middle-class respondents both recognised and sought to distance themselves
from.
In contrast to the working-class gardeners, the middle-class respondents had
a sense of generating a garden with a particular ethos. Using their knowledge of
garden history, they were able to at least partially set their gardens within particular
traditions, for example of 'formality' or 'informality'. While my middle-class
respondents could not be described as having a Kantian approach to garden aesthetics,
the ethos of their planting was underpinned by a strong sense of form. While these
gardeners were working with living referents as opposed to the textuality of signs,
some of them were well acquainted with using plant form in a painterly manner.
Companion planting - a method advocated by Christopher Lloyd - which requires
a skilful understanding of how to blend the colour, tactility and lifelong architecture
of plants, was pivotal to the ethos of some of the gardens I visited. In these ways, the
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