Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 163

possibilities provided by the garden media. One of the questions I posed during the
interviews was: 'Do you have any dreams or aspirations for the future?' The pattern
that emerged from this line of enquiry was that if respondents had few dreams and
diminishing aspirations, they were unlikely to be hailed by media lifestyle ideas. It
was by no means always the case that older respondents had a more static conception
of their garden, however, when being older co-incided with being working-class,
there were virtually no new garden plans. Class and age provided a double block on
entry to new garden projects; for them, mere maintenance became an aspiration in
itself. This had a direct bearing on their reception of garden lifestyle ideas.
When I asked Philip and Catherine if they had ever been influenced by the garden
media, they responded by immediately discounting themselves as an appropriate
garden lifestyle audience:
Lisa T : Can you ever think of a time when you've been influenced by a gardening
personality?
Catherine : I might be I think if we were younger and didn't have things how we want.
You know my son has just bought a brand new house. It's just a mass of weeds. They just
don't know what to do with it, you know.
Philip : I think they'll be influenced by watching those sorts of programmes.
Catherine : They would, because they've got a bare garden there with nothing and they
want ideas as to what to do with it.
Here Catherine immediately falls to thinking of her son, as opposed to herself, at
the consideration of new ideas for the garden. Catherine and Philip have the garden
'how [they] want it'; here they shift the idea of new projects and aspirations to
young, relatively mobile people like their son and his new wife. In these ways,
Catherine and Philip have a means of watching makeover programmes while writing
themselves out of the lifestyle possibilities the programmes offer.
Doris also had watching strategies which precluded her sense of herself as an active
consumer of media lifestyle ideas. She watched Ground Force without ever being
hailed by its ideas. Always mindful of her own constraints of space and economic
resources, such as money and lack of transport, she placed a barrier between herself
as gardener and the programme's incitement for her to take up its ideas. One of the
strategies she used as a means of curbing her involvement in programme content
was to 'outsize' gardens shown on television, in this way she was able to strike a
vast difference between gardens on television and her own garden. As a result, any
comparison between her garden and television images of gardens became entirely
unrealistic and unachievable:
Doris : I mean you watch programmes on the television and they show you these marvellous
gardens, well they're massive aren't they so they can take big plants, and that, like pampas
grass, well it's far too big for a garden like mine. It isn't that I don't like plants, you know,
it's I can't have them, if you understand me, rather than don't like them, I just can't have
them for my size of border.