Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 165

Gender
Throughout this topic I argue that gardening is both classed and gendered. In chapters
5 and 7, I explore the traditionally gendered images of gardeners from the late 1990s,
where men mow, clip and construct and women decorate and plant. I argue that even
the madeover garden, with its use of 'curvy' hard-landscaping and pink planting
schemes, was used, as I demonstrate using Homefront: Inside Out, as a means to
express the 'latent' femininity of the makeover subject. In chapter 7, I empirically
evidence that traditional, gendered ways of gardening continued to be practiced in
ordinary gardens - though some gardeners represented a challenge to traditional
modes of being in the garden.
In terms of lifestyle media consumption however, I found only scant empirical
evidence to suggest that gender impacted on the consumption practices of the men
and women of this study. Only one instance of gendered lifestyle consumption was
offered during the time I spent with my respondents: interestingly it was an example
culled from a compartment outside the garden lifestyle media.
In chapter 7, I argue that when men and women lived together, regardless of class,
age or gender, it was almost as though they had made a tacit agreement to perform
staunchly demarcated, gendered modes of gardening. For example, working-class
couple John and Stephanie had a starkly drawn model of gendered garden tasks:
John's role was to provide a structural, DIY garden canvas for Stephanie to 'titivate'
using her essentially female decorative skills. Interestingly, Stephanie was the
only respondent who made any claims to gendered lifestyle consumption, but the
gardening lifestyle media was not where Stephanie went for inspiration:
Lisa T : Have you got any gardening magazines?
Stephanie : Well. I 'aven't any actual gardening magazines, but women's magazines do
'ave garden sections in them.
Lisa T : Do you pay attention to those?
Stephanie : Oh yeah, yeah, 'cos they 'ave like, what you should be doing in your garden
this month an' each month as it goes along. They'll say, “Right, prune this or so and sos
in season.” An' they'll usually have some nice colour photo. pages that I suppose if you
wanted you could frame yourself and make a little picture (laughs).
John : We 'ave done that 'aven't we?
Stephanie : We 'ave done that in the past.
For Stephanie, the monthly advice offered by general interest magazines seemed
to suit the rhythm of her own instructional requirements. And the images, here
valued not for their form, but for their ability to realistically and functionally portray
beautiful gardens, also held a cut-out-and-keep appeal which was good enough to
adorn the walls of her home. Indeed, reading about gardening in a women's general
interest magazine - an aspect of popular culture devoted to the construction of