Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 3

garden. The questions it asks and answers tell us something about the periodicity of
classed and gendered relations in the garden and in television and media culture. And
if there is to be a continuingly productive study of socio-cultural practises in relation
to mediated culture, then it must learn from accounts of the past.
The topic is organised around a number of key concerns which emanate from
textual and ethnographic data gathered between 1998 and 1999; in this way, its
findings detail a finite historical moment. Essentially it offers an analysis of the
garden in television and media culture. Then using ethnographic data, it explores
classed and gendered gardening practises as well as the relationship between media
culture and gardening. Below, I sketch out the questions I pose in relation to these
key concerns.
As a means of investigating the wider discursive regimes which play their part in
the construction of ordinary classed and gendered identities, the topic examines late
1990s images of the garden and gardening in the national and local lifestyle media.
Using lifestyle programming and garden journalism, I ask if ordinary aesthetics were
given legitimation in those representations of the garden. The topic recognises the
increased role of ordinary people as both 'experts' and lifestyle subjects. Arguing
that this trend was indicative of a wider social shift in our culture, it asks whether the
increase in ordinary subjects led to a concomitant embrace of previously marginalised
representations of class and gender.
There are profound differences between how middle and working-class people
have been socially, culturally and economically positioned in Britain since the
nineteenth century. Domestic gardening has historically been conceived as a form
of working-class regulation, while the middle-class have been positioned by urban
planning as the group with the power to survey how the working-class live. I argue
that working-class values have been systematically undermined by the institutional
imposition of middle-class cultural values. And working-class people have more
limited access to economic, social and cultural resources than members of the
middle-class. This topic shows how gardening has been used as a form of social
class control. The chapters which follow unravel by what methods cultural values
have been imposed on working-class people. Through an analysis of the varying
distribution of resource assets, I ask if their equity bestows power on their owners
and how such power is manifest in the context of the everyday practise of gardening.
Arguing that gardening relies on taste as a symbolic mode of communication, which
is closely imbricated with questions of identity, it asks whether different modes of
classed and gendered being translate into how people practise gardening. And if
there is a classed and gendered aesthetic, what factors comprise its visual look?
Since the topic asks if gardening forms part of class identity, I ask what locations
of gender bring to classed modes of gardening. The construction of gender is
predicated on its proximity to class locations. Working-class women, for example,
have historically been denied the right to be ladies, because of their distance from
middle-classness. I question what gendered proximities to class bring to gardening
practises: I ask, for example, what differences reside in the kinds of masculine and
feminine gardening working- and middle-class people do. Recognising that gender
is always classed, the topic also questions what differences exist between men
and women's gardening: can gardening be understood historically as a gendered