Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 161

their use of middle-class publications and the working-class gardeners quoted more
down-market, local aspects of the gardening media.
Radio Four's Gardeners' Question Time was popular with my middle-class
respondents, as was Christopher Lloyd's gardening column in The Guardian weekend
supplement. And, since as I argue in chapter 6 that my middle-class respondents were
in possession of social capital, that is, they were members of horticultural societies,
several of them read the Royal Horticultural Society monthly journal The Garden.
While most of my middle-class respondents made definite claims that they never
purchased gardening magazines though they read ones passed on by relatives, Anne
and Phoebe told me that they had bought and enjoyed New Eden .
By contrast the working-class gardeners had come into contact with more
cheaply produced garden lifestyle television programmes on cable and satellite
channels and they drew on the local press for inspiration. Keith told me that he used
gardening features from the tabloid press. Almost all these gardeners insisted that
they too never bought gardening magazines: 'Never,' Philip told me, 'I have never
bought a gardening magazine ever'. However, Millie said that while she had bought
Gardeners' World magazine, she had bought what she described as a 'gardening
book' called Gardening Made Easy which she bought every week, which was
collected into plastic folders to make four volumes. Exceptionally, Stephanie told
me that she did read magazine features on gardening, but in her monthly women's
general interest magazine as opposed to a gardening magazine.
However, while there were stark classed differences between both the mediums
and the texts my respondents selected, all the gardeners I spoke to were fully
conversant with the makeover garden lifestyle genre. All the gardeners I spoke to
had a reasonably extensive knowledge of the genre: they were conversant with
its conventions, they were familiar with a number of personality interpreters and
they had seen the execution of a range of garden lifestyle projects. The makeover
programme they were most familiar with was the BBC's flagship garden makeover
programme Ground Force . Each of the gardeners I interviewed, regardless of class,
age or gender, had been hailed by the popularity of the terrestrial 8-9 p.m. lifestyle
slot.
Questions of Access and Consumption: Class, Age and Gender
Class
Using Bourdieu (1986) I argue in chapter 5 that access to media images and lifestyle
ideas which display legitimate garden aesthetics is incumbent on the habitus of the
reader/viewer and on their access to forms of economic, cultural and social capital.
Access or blocks on entry to forms of capital has real effects on people's ability to
organise the visual language of gardening, as chapter 6 empirically evidences. The
competencies and knowledges specific to my respondents' class location had a direct
bearing on both what they consumed and how they were able to synthesise lifestyle
images.