Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 153

Lisa T : Is it unusual for men to be doing that kind of work or not?
James : No it's not unusual. There are one or two excellent men makers-up, particularly in
this area. But it's more a feminine, majority it's female without a doubt. I think generally
women have more flair.
Lisa T : Do you?
James : I think they've more feel than men, well for that kind of thing, for weddings and
bouquets. I mean although mine were quite acceptable, when I got help in …florists from
Huddersfield, young girls learning in a more modern way, I thought their work was a lot
more sensitive than mine, it had more touch and feel about it. From my point of view I
was heavier with my make-up but the girls were flimsier, but to me that's more feminine.
It was light and fair. I mean my wreath, my bouquets…she did it with less wires than I did,
she finished up with a much more sensitive piece, lighter…
Having already admitted his own flair for 'making-up' his step away from light,
sensitive, flimsy floristry, demonstrates his comfort and pleasure with aesthetics
which he defines as manly; he felt free to use his skills on the serious, public floral
signifiers required for funeral wreaths, but his masculinity acted as a barrier when it
came to arrangements for women. Masculine cultural capital was located in flower
arranging, in ways which could be traded at the local level both economically and
culturally; but it involved the careful selective culling of the manly attributes and
skills which for these working-class men inhere in flower-arranging.
When I first met Rosemary one of the first things she told me was, 'I'm a flower
arranger.' Both Rosemary and Maud were key organisers of the Spen Valley Flower
Club - an organisation that ran flower arranging competitions and set a calendar
of monthly demonstrations of florist demonstrations. Rosemary's involvement in
floristry was intimately connected to her choice of garden aesthetics. Their beds and
borders were organised around the key aesthetic tenets of flower arranging:
Rosemary : Well, I'm a flower arranger.
Lisa T : Right.
Rosemary : So if you look at the garden there's colour, form and texture.
Lisa T : Right.
Rosemary : But not necessarily flowers (pause).
Lisa T : OK …What about how flower arranging works in terms of the beds then?
Rosemary : Well I belong to a flower club and have done for a long time. So a lot of the
plants are unusual plants because they're there for foliage and for the colour and for the
form.
Colour, texture and form were principles that were very deliberately fed back into
the garden and this made for effective companion planting and gave a painterly