Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 162

Several of my middle-class respondents, for example, had been teachers or they
had higher education qualifications; they were therefore endowed with measures of
institutionalised cultural capital and this had a bearing on their access to lifestyle
image consumption. Anne, for example, a fine art graduate, was able to carry her
knowledge of surely the most lauded arena of the arts qualifications - art history
- to bear on her reception of lifestyle ideas. In my discussion with Anne about the
garden media, she was able to identify the historical and cultural artistic allusions
which inhered in some media lifestyle ideas. Describing a roof garden makeover
that had utilised desert plants, grasses and mirrors, Anne drew on her knowledge of
Spanish art as a means to describe it as, 'having a Gaudi feel to it.' Similarly, Anne
and her daughter Phoebe, a textiles graduate, showed their ability to display what
Bourdieu would describe as 'elite taste' (Bourdieu 1990b) in relation to magazine
photography. In an exchange about the magazine New Eden , for example, Anne and
Phoebe demonstrate that their appreciation of photography goes beyond merely
looking through representational form at utilitarian images of plants:
Anne : There was this really expensive one, wasn't there?
Phoebe : I was gonna buy it the other day.
Lisa T : Which one, can you remember?
Anne : It's a new one, what's it called? It's square …
Lisa T : New Eden .
Phoebe : Lovely!
Anne : Beautiful photographs. Now that does attract me to them. I like to take close-ups
of flowers, or close-ups of anything.
Phoebe : Yeah, mum's a really good photographer.
Here the appreciation of the form of close-up photography, a medium described
by Bourdieu as a 'middle-brow medium' (1990), takes precedence over the use of
photographs for their function of portraying plant varieties. Aesthetic appreciation
of lifestyle form is privileged over its function. It was the possession of cultural
capital amongst my middle-class respondents which enabled this particular mode of
lifestyle media consumption. The cultural references encased in magazines such as
New Eden was only available to those with sufficient capitals to unlock them: class
determined access to particular aesthetic codes and allusions.
Age
Class, however, is not the only determinant which might either provide access or
block entry to media lifestyle consumption. Age, a variable - especially in relation to
older viewers - that has been given relatively short shrift in media reception studies
(see as an exception Tulloch, 1989), was also a factor which hampered gardening