Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 127

middle-class gardeners are located within the boundaries of Bourdieu's description
of legitimate taste: appreciation of the form of plants could be enjoyed just as one
might appreciate Leonardo's use of chiaroscuro light effects or Seurat's use of the
pointillist technique. These gardeners understood that they were generating an
aesthetic visual plane using plant form as their materials, but the form of the plants
took precedence over their function. In similar vein, these gardeners had a learned
belief in an aesthetic of 'naturalness': plants must be given free rein to develop
their forms as nature intended - the challenge therefore was to use the materials
while holding respect for the form. Indeed the conservatism of their approach was
reminiscent of the Darwinian aesthetics advocated by Willy Lange in late nineteenth
century Germany - aesthetics subsequently adopted by the National Socialists (see
chapter 4). The appreciation of form, as Bourdieu (1986, 1990) argues, was the
cornerstone of the middle-class approach to aesthetics: it enabled them to spatially
exhibit their legitimate tastes and cultural capital.
As my ethnographic evidence also highlights, the middle-class gardeners
understood how to use strategies of social distinction in relation to ordinary
gardening practices. By denigrating working-class planting aesthetics - tight
clipping, bedding plants and anxious tidying - they worked to continually locate
themselves in differential terms as anything but working-class. One can see the same
moves to differentiate away from working-class aesthetics in middle-class garden
writing. The confident judgemental tone which characterises Christopher Lloyd's
writing, for example, is reminiscent of the voices of my middle-class respondents.
In the garden instruction manual The Well-Chosen Garden (1984) Lloyd points out
undesirable plants and planting practices; in short unhappy combinations which can
come about as the result of insufficient knowledge or bad judgement. Monotony of
form might be one error or companion planting which is ill-conceived might turn
out to produce an 'indigestible bellyful' (Lloyd 1984, 40). Then there are plants
themselves which embody bad taste: Lloyd tells the reader to avoid the 'crude pink'
of the bedding plant ivy geranium, to steer clear of over-powering 'coarse and
muscular' daffodils and to find methods to curtail certain plants prone to 'thuggery'
or infiltration. These plants are like their working-class correspondents; they're out
on the streets, they're tough and ill-disciplined and they're reproductively rampant.
And there are modes of being in the garden, here presented as startlingly akin to the
practices I found in working-class gardens, which are also undesirable. The 'ordinary'
gardener (unclassed by Lloyd, but who is identifiably working-class), insufficiently
knowledgeable about plants to ever 'get it right', is prone to obsessional policing
practices: 'The inter-locking and weaving of plants … will rarely be met where
orderliness is of the essence and every plant is allowed its place but no more. Thus
the hoe is kept busy round each border clump and the next. There has to be a line
of demarcating soil between one clump and the next' (Lloyd 1984, 26). And later,
'some lawn and neatness enthusiasts (they are never true plant lovers) take enormous
pride in this discontinuity … lawn; cliff-edge; well-weeded border margin of clean
earth; then your first border plants, neat things like annual alyssum' (Lloyd 1984,
28). The working-class gardener too uptight to sit back and think critically about
their practices is prone to tidying madness, later for example, keeping a tiled roof
free of mosses is described as a 'mania' (Lloyd 1984, 92). Lloyd's writing, which is