Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 160

texts almost under sufferance, when clearly they watch enough gardening lifestyle
programmes on which to base a number of evidenced opinions as to their value.
These kinds of distancing strategies may indicate, as both Brunsdon (1997) and
Leal (1990) remind us, that middle-class people in both Britain and South America
consider television to be a 'bad cultural object' (Brunsdon 1997, 114). Similarly,
Seiter's (1992) ethnographic work shows that people she interviewed about soaps
felt ashamed to admit, in the presence of an academic, their appreciation of what
they felt to be unworthy television.
But while it might be argued that television as a medium is denigrated by middle-
class consumers, lifestyle magazines were also held at arms' length. This suggests
that both the medium and the notion of lifestyle were regarded as unworthy. For
example, several of my respondents demonstrated the need to show that they were
only 'secondary' magazine readers; that is, they would only ever read them if they
were passed on by a relative, or if they 'happened' to come across magazines while
doing something else. 'I've looked at them because my mum buys them' Millie told
me and Rosemary said, 'we used to have one passed on by a relative, now we only
read them at the dentist (laughter)'. The pervasive view of lifestyle as somehow
'trivial' (Brunsdon et. al., 2001) is likely to contribute to the need for these middle-
class gardeners to efface their actual enjoyment of lifestyle. Indeed these distancing
strategies are reminiscent of middle-class approaches to garden taste and aesthetics
explored in chapter 6. Using Bourdieu (1986), I argue that middle-class people are
skilled at differentiating themselves from the vulgarity of working-class aesthetics;
indeed, I argue that middle-class garden aesthetics are forged out of a will to reject
working-classness. Here I extend the Bourdieusian argument: such differentiation
strategies are also at work in how middle-class people discursively positioned
themselves in relation to lifestyle consumption.
What they consumed
When I asked my respondents what aspects of the gardening media they consumed,
their choices were starkly demarcated, most especially in terms of class. I argue
in chapter 5 that there were differences between national and local garden media
aesthetics. Legitimated compartments of the media, which are always national,
assumed the possession of measures of institutionalised cultural capital on the part
of their audiences. This was certainly the case with regard to particular elements
of terrestrial television and some elements of national magazine and newspaper
publishing. One need only consider, for example, journalist/presenter Monty Don
- with his patrician persona, waxed Barber coat and corduroys and resoundingly
middle-class English received pronunciation - to know that his weekend column
in The Observer and the gardening programme he presented Real Gardens (C4,
1998-) was to be consumed by middle-class audiences who were either rich in, or
at least moderately equipped, with cultural capital. Local capitals, often found in
aspects of the local evening or weekend press were constructed to appeal to working-
class consumers. And so it was: when I asked my small sample of gardeners which
aspects of the media they used, the middle-class respondents predictably recounted