Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 152

traded for economic capital and that imported masculine economic value - with its
links to employment and bread-winning - onto the appreciation of the flower, one
that made it acceptable in masculine taste circles.
James's early apprenticeship in floristry had begun at Lassett Hall in the sixty
foot baronial-type hall where the gardeners had been required, on a regular basis,
to fill the huge urn there with a large floral arrangement using, among a range of
flowers, gladioli and a select number of chrysanthemums. But the chrysanthemum
was not a plant the owners of Lassett Hall were especially interested in:
James : I think it's personal taste. I like chrysanthemums. I'm a chrysanthemum man.
Lisa T : And were chrysanthemums equally prized by these owners?
James : No. No. It was purely a money machine. They all went to the market, all these
things. They all went to the wholesale market in Halifax. It was to help cushion the cost
of the rising estate.
Lisa T : Didn't they want any of them themselves?
James : Well, they took what they wanted, but that was a fleabite.
Chrysanthemums were to James's employers a mass-produced good, useful as a
'filler', but more serviceable as a plant that could satisfy working-class tastes in
exchange for a useful profit. The owners of Lassett Hall had tastes which were not
just confined to local produce, their travels around the world had meant that they
would come home from far flung destinations with requests that James and his team
grow exotic fruit or plants that were unsuitable for the British climate. James's
wealthy owners, mindful that chrysanthemums were prized by the working-class
moved on to plants that signified their ability to travel and appreciate exotic plant
varieties.
One of the gardeners who had shown James how to arrange flowers in the urn at
Lassett Hall was to have an important influence on him. Mr Burton had nurseries at
Elland, was a florist himself and he had shown flowers at Southport - he was, James
told me, 'a pretty good fellow and he had a pretty good feel.' He also began to show
James how to make wreaths - a skill on which James would come to depend when he
moved into his 'florist's horticultural shop'. James's account of his work as a flower
arranger at his shop in Brighouse throws up interesting contradictions about gender,
floristry skills and aesthetics. On the one hand, he told me that while floristry could
be learned, one needed 'flair', 'feel' or 'touch'. James had, 'the flair for making-up',
the kind of innate skill that his wife Joy and her sister, who also worked in the shop,
lacked - they didn't have, 'the touch.' But despite James's essentialist conception of
himself as someone with the skills to use his hands sensitively to combine flowers in
aesthetically imaginative ways, he relegated wedding bouquets to his wife, her sister
and casual female employees while he took on wreath work:
James : I remember I got 'flu (laughs) and Joyce was having to bring flowers into the
bedroom and onto the bed for me to make wreaths.