Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 155

feminine capital through their planting aesthetic. Already placed at close proximity
to middle-class femininity, these women made an investment in feminised aesthetics
as a means of holding their grip on the performance of ease, frailty and luxury
associated with middle-class 'ladies'. In connection with this they recognised that
being ladylike involved a passive and restrained approach to activity and as a result
they were careful to indicate their dissociation from gardening labour or tidying. By
contrast, the working-class women of the sample had less time for feminised garden
aesthetics. More taken with the concern to produce respectability, my study revealed
that on the whole order, cleanliness and bare earth took precedence in the working-
class women's gardens I visited. The desire to keep order was such a burdensome
and laborious activity that they lacked the resources for thinking about a gendered
aesthetic. In working-class women's lives, the need to dis-identify with what they
knew were the pejorative associations people made in terms of their class took
precedence. Femininity was a luxury reserved for my middle-class respondents.
Conclusion
Using ethnographic evidence, the previous chapter argued that the ordinary garden is
a site where identities of class are performed and lived out. This chapter continues to
present new local knowledge 'from below' about ordinary garden practices, however,
building on the conclusions presented in chapter 6, it argues that the ordinary garden
is both classed and gendered and that gender is constructed in relation to its proximity
to class. Using Butler's (1990, 1997) idea that gender is performed and the debate
waged between Bourdieu and Butler with regard to the institutional anchorage of
performatives, it explores three key sites of gendered gardening. Firstly, it argues
that there is a history of gendered tasks and responsibilities which are rooted and
socially learned within the family. Bourdieu's argument that performatives require
institutional sanction is affirmed by older respondents who still followed same-sex
parents in their gendered tasks. However it also faced challenge since some younger
respondents drew from both parents in ways which upturned traditional gender
conventions. Secondly, it revealed that when men and women occupy the same
living space, they tended to make a tacit agreement to perform heterosexual gender
by adopting traditionally gendered gardening practices. It argued that conventional
modes of gendered being are given institutional sanction by the media. However,
the performance of gendered gardening and its potential for radical change was
shored up by examples of women who lived outside heterosexual relationships and
who lived alone. In those cases women unfettered by institutional sanction, 'made
like men' and performed extraordinary physical gardening feats. In this way, these
ordinary, yet radical examples of gardening 'gender trouble' (Butler 1990) may well
be responsible for the more politically empowering images of gender found among
garden lifestyle personality-interpreters of the late 1990s. Thirdly, using feminist
work (Skeggs 1997) which has modified Bourdieu's (1986) metaphors of capital, I
argue that forms of gendered capital which inhere in garden aesthetics confer value on
to their beholders. For example, already assured of their proximity to respectability,
some of the middle-class women of the study invested in feminised aesthetics as a