Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 147

Rosemary : Raspberries and blackcurrants.
Lisa T : OK so you've got set tasks between you?
Rosemary : Well, mother does obviously she can't do the lawn, can she? (laughs)
Lisa T : No I realise that. I'm just interested in the way you divide that up between you…
and so it's according to your interests and expertise?
Maud : Yes, that's right.
Rosemary : And (laughs) physical ability.
Indicative of their middle-class status, when Maud and Rosemary refer to 'help', they
mean staff. And interestingly, Maud defines her tasks as 'hobbies', thereby providing
a distance from the idea that gardening might be conceived as labour. Elsewhere
they were careful to dissociate themselves from domestic labour, 'I don't like it and
it doesn't like me,' Maud told me, and they were anxious to generate the impression
that they had no time for tidiness, order and labour-making gardening tasks. Aware
of the lack of value that these kinds of activities yielded within middle-class circles,
they sought to distinguish themselves from them.
There were other cases where older women took on the entire gamut of gardening
tasks, including manual work. Doris an 80-year-old woman who had been a housewife
before being widowed, even built her own garden paths.
Lisa T : And so, who did all the …? Because, you've got like rocks … and your
pathway?
Doris : Oh yes, I did it all.
Lisa T : You did all of that?
Doris : Oh yes.
Lisa T : Because that's heavy work!
Doris : Mmmmm, I've done it all. In fact I think some people are surprised, because they
think 'cos I've three sons they do it, but they haven't done a thing.
In these ways Doris's differences from Maud and Rosemary are starkly drawn. Like
Stephanie and John, Doris considers her garden to be very public. She is anxiously
tidy and devoted to a highly routinised daily rhythm of gardening labour in the hope
that others will notice and value her work. In this way, her willingness to perform
manual labour is an extension of a set of tasks - the endless leaf sweeping, the daily
hoeing - that she already performs in order to maintain an impeccably tidy garden.
While these instances are cross-cut by the proximity of gender to class, what
is most significant is the preparedness these women have to perform masculine
gardening tasks. These instances expose the limits of Bourdieu's conception of
performativity. In particular, in cases where women found themselves living alone,