Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 144

function for their owners. Unlike John, who was in possession of a specific vocabulary
through which to describe his wife's ornamental contribution, James and Keith used
discursive strategies which allowed them to write the idea of decoration out of their
versions of what gardening means. My interview with James, for example, consisted
of a number of topics: his working conditions as a gardener in private service, his forte
for propagation, the correct way to use and clean gardening tools, his opinion about
gardening lifestyle programmes, his memories of which plants his bosses preferred,
his production of chrysanthemums and his experience of floristry - but none of these
topics touched on the idea of garden embellishment or beautification.
In these ways, my study demonstrates that many of the gardeners I interviewed
chose to act out staunchly traditional heterosexual gendered gardening roles. Most
of the couples I interviewed divided and executed their tasks into heavy/structural
masculine duties and light/decorative feminine tasks. Elsewhere, the people of my
study used discursive strategies to gender their tasks in appropriately traditional
ways. For example, where gardening had been a form of masculine employment it
was defined as a physically tough and demanding profession and when men strayed
into decorative gardening domains, they found ways to discursively avoid any
reference to feminine forms of beautification.
Turning to the media, such findings should not really surprise us. While I argue in
chapter 5 that the lifestyle garden media embraced a shift in gendered identities using
personality-interpreters such as Laurence Llwelyn-Bowen and Charlie Dimmock,
the media was also replete with images of traditionally gendered gardening. For
example, the features in a News of the World Sunday supplement entitled Gardening
from Scratch typically demonstrates the different tasks men and women were
traditionally assigned in the garden. One feature Tough Turf But We Managed It!
shows a photo-strip lawn make-over where two men are shown heavy digging and
turf laying in a North London garden. Several pages later, Emmerdale Farm actress
Lisa Riley is shown planting containers and hanging baskets using a variety of
bedding plants. Unfortunately, these examples are illustrative of how gardening was,
and still is, predominantly represented in the media: men do heavy structural work
and women do decorative gardening tasks.
These kinds of images had some bearing on lived garden practices. Peoples'
gardens are leisure sites - yet they are spaces which are fastened to the institutional
backdrop of the media. The process of how men and women come to recognise
themselves as gendered subjects depends to some extent on the process by which
they synthesise textually constructed versions of masculinity and femininity. Textual
mediations of how and by whom garden labour is performed had an important
bearing on the ways in which some men and women of this study chose to become
particular kinds of gendered subjects in the garden. Conventional images of
gender in publishing and advertising, like the ones mentioned above, act to give
institutional social sanction to the polarised differences in what kinds of gardening
some of the men and women take up. As my sample demonstrates, this kind of
institutional legitimation may have acted as a powerful impetus for men and women
to offer agency to traditional modes of performed subjectivity. In several cases and
regardless of class, the men and women of my sample gardened in ways which
affirmed conventional gender roles. Social circumstance - in particular male/female