Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 135

Fort adds, men are interested in lawns and greens because the act of caring for them
literally prepares the ground for male sports such as cricket and golf.
My study of lived gendered gardening practices gives credence to these historical
studies. Present day gardening is not organised around food production in the
ways that Scott-James, Crouch and Ward and other writers who have concentrated
on civilian wartime vegetable production demonstrate (see for example, Davis
1993). Nonetheless, as section two shows, contemporary female gardeners still
perform decorative gardening tasks using flowers and herbs; and while men do
still produce vegetables, men's gardening has shifted to doing structural projects
using construction tools and garden technology. One of the first sites where these
historical modes of gendered gardening become embedded and are perpetuated is in
the family. Significantly, when my respondents mentioned their parents it was the
case that without exception, the parents of my respondents had all performed the
gendered tasks highlighted by the authors cited above; most of the gardeners over
50 for example, told me that their fathers had grown vegetables on an allotment.
And when I asked my respondents where they had acquired their gardening skills,
several of them cited their parents as formative influences on their interests and
competencies. In this way, Bourdieu's argument that performatives are institutionally
sanctioned is offered empirical credence; the following responses demonstrate the
power of familial social learning in relation to gardening. While Maud told me that
gardening, 'just comes naturally when you've lived in the country,' her mother and
father's skills were clear influences:
Lisa T : Did you learn from your parents? Or is it something that you acquired yourself?
Rosemary : Grandma had a cottage garden. Your mother had a cottage garden, didn't
she?
Maud : Yeah.
Rosemary : Yeah.
Lisa T : And are these skills that you've passed down to each other then? (Maud laughs,
turning to Rosemary)You learnt from your mother? (Maud laughs)
Rosemary : Well, my father taught rural studies - they've always been there.
In their concern to demonstrate natural skills that have 'always been there' Rosemary
and Maud show a reluctance to foreground the acquisition of skills through an actual
learning process. Yet the blend of educational and experiential influences from
Maud's parents had a crucial influence on her and they have clearly been passed
down to her daughter Rosemary. But even if we assume that Maud learned from both
her parents, both herself and her daughter express a preference for flowers, herbs and
soft fruit as opposed to vegetables, this marks their garden out as a more typically
feminine space.
As children, in some cases, sons tended to identify with their father's activities
and daughters identified with their mothers; and later in life, as I show in section two,
cohabiting men and women in particular tended to adhere to activities designated