Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 168

ideas as undesirable and symbolic of a wider, lamentable decline in traditional,
authentic garden practices.
John told me, for example, 'I've seen two or three programmes and I think
“garbage”'. But beyond decrying the makeover, respondents had a critical approach
to the garden media. There is by now a long-standing tradition in media and cultural
studies which credits the powers of the discriminating, critical and 'active' media
audience (Gillespie 1995; Jenkins 1992; Nava and Nava 1992; Seiter et al. 1989; Willis
1990). In line with this work, the people of this study had a thought-out rationale on
which to base their criticisms of garden lifestyle. For many of them, gardening was
an authentic hobby which had to be performed in real time. The 'instant' makeover
had no real relationship with gardening in the true sense. Authentic gardening was
conceived as a skill-set which requires perseverance across years of practice. Instant
gardeners had no business calling themselves 'gardeners'. As David told me:
David : I don't like instant gardening. It's taken sixty years to do that and for these people
to say they're gardeners and then you can get a lorry to take all the muck away and get
another lorry with £100.00's worth of plants all at one go. So you've got so much new
stuff to look at in one go…
Lisa T : It goes against …
David : Anybody who's done that can't call themselves gardeners really.
Lisa : No.
David : It shows that they want a nice garden and they want to spend a week at the seaside
don't it?
Similarly, Rosemary told me that makeover programmes were a 'good idea for
people who are not gardeners,' adding, 'a garden grows over years.' For others, 'real'
gardening was about carrying out garden labour methodically and appropriately.
While Chaney (2001) argues that those who embrace lifestyles accept the
production of authenticity using resources from the consumer and leisure industries,
the gardeners I spoke to excoriated manufactured gardening consumption and
bemoaned the fall of traditional methods of garden-making. Take for example, the
following points made by David about his soil and compost making:
David : I have a feeling that a lot of these blokes on gardening programmes have some
lovely soil there. They've made it look so easy for people to garden. But you see I don't
go off into a - say garden centre - and see all these lovely green and yellow coloured bags.
I never buy any. I have things out there that have been there years and years. The soil's
improved. Dug over and composted, year after year.
For these gardeners, media makeover gardening was aligned to the unnecessary
expense of the garden centre. Rosemary described makeover programmes as,
'expensive', remarking that her retaining wall, would be far too expensive for such
programmes to create using 'original' materials. These gardeners turned a blind eye
to lifestyling from symbolic consumer resources. Gardening for them was about