Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 7

as a material spatial entity; and there is, as I establish in chapter 3, no study which
addresses the particular questions about class and gender in relation to the private
small town garden addressed in this topic. I argue therefore that in order to find out
whether gardens as spaces where dichotomies such as professional/domestic, public/
private, masculine/feminine, work/leisure, exterior/interior remain staunchly intact
or whether those boundaries can be eschewed as some navigate different ways of
constructing their class and gender locations, one needs participant centred research
methods. The garden as a new consumption space with its own specificities, requires
ethnographic enquiry: this method has the potential to reveal whether the ideas and
assumptions about the garden as a specific nexus of classed and gendered power
relations have any material grounding in peoples' homes.
Finding Out …: Towards an Ethnography of Gardening
This topic is based on a small-scale empirical study of a group of gardeners based
in the North of England. I lived, for an eight month period, in the same small town
community of the gardeners on which this study is based (for a resume of how the
respondents were accessed, their personal details and how they are 'classified' by
the study see Appendix 1). I draw on Bourdieu to argue that gardening is a field;
a social sphere where struggles occur over access to its particular resources (for
a more detailed definition of Bourdieu's terms see chapter 2). The practises in the
empirical data illustrate the types of habitus as well as the strategies which are
deployed and produced by the opportunities and inhibitors determined by the shape
of the field. In this way, my empirical mapping acts to highlight the struggles which
my respondents used for accruing, deploying and trading their various capitals in
order to vie for improved positions in the field.
In order to gather the data, I used a number of qualitative ethnographic
techniques. I engaged in participant observation: that is, I conducted semi-structured
and informal conversational interviews in the living rooms, gardens, conservatories
and greenhouses of the participants of the study (see Appendix 3 for details of the
interviews). I helped respondents to garden (see Figure 1.1). The photograph shows
Doris, with hoe and trowel, at the other end of the grass verge at the front of her
house that I am helping to weed. I also became familiar with their gardens, either by
helping them to garden, observing their gardening or by being 'toured' around them.
I used what Ball and Smith call 'Camera-Supported Ethnographic Work' (2001,
313); I took photographs, which offer supporting visual evidence of the gardens
on which this study is based. And on invitation from my chief informant, I joined
the Spen Valley Flower Club , which arranged lunches, garden visits, and flower
arranging events at the local church and secondary school. I also attempted, through
participant observation, to glean some of the life history of the participants (see
Appendix 2 for personal biographies of the people of the study). In these ways, I
used ethnographic techniques as a means of gathering data which would build a
'picture' of gardening as an ordinary aspect of everyday familial life, as an activity
which generated interaction between the participants and as a cultural entity in a
typical small town community.