Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 131

Chapter 7
Gender and Gardening
Thomas almost entirely dominated the discussion. I have virtually no idea what kind of
gardener Lena is! Do I need to interview women on their own? (extract from field notes
after interview with Thomas and Lena)
John : I'm into DIY, I like to say “well I've done that garden an' our lass 'as finished it.”
She's dressed it, which is basically it.
Stephanie : That's what I do in t' house. He does all t' like heavy work …makes the
furniture.
John : She does the trimmings.
Stephanie : And I do all t' trimmings. Even at Christmas I do all t' trimmings.
Keith : I mean me father always was a keen gardener but leaning more towards homegrown
vegetables, whereas me mum always liked her plants.
Rosemary : We don't grow anything rigid. We prefer soft forms.
James: I'm a chrysanthemum man.
Introduction
This chapter empirically examines if the garden is a classed and gendered space.
I argue that the construction of gender rests on its proximity to positions of class.
Working-class women, for example, have historically been denied the right to be
'ladies', because of their distance from middle-classness (Skeggs 1997). In this
chapter, I interrogate what gendered proximities to class bring to gardening practices:
I ask, what differences inhered in the kinds of masculine and feminine gardening
working- and middle-class people did in 1990s British culture. Comprised of three
sections, the first part of the chapter explores the historical antecedents of gendered
gardening; the second turns to garden practices and asks if men and women do
different types of gardening; and the third using case studies of floristry and flower
arranging, asks if there was a specifically gendered collection of aesthetic practices
among the people of the study.
In chapter 3 I set up the main theoretical framework for the empirical findings
around questions of class and gender. In the previous chapter, I drew on Bourdieu's
notion of 'capitals' to suggest that the gardening tastes and aesthetic dispositions
of the subjects of this study were saturated by class distinctions (Bourdieu 1986).