Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 169

working with the authentic and sometimes inclement, raw materials offered by
the garden itself. And there was an acceptance that that meant bending to seasonal
conditions, traditional garden knowledge and hard labour.
For Chaney (1996, 2001), the lifestyle is a new social form, redolent of the
wider social shift away from traditional, civic ways of life. I would argue that the
gardeners I interviewed were at least partially sentient of that shift. Experientially,
they regarded the move to lifestyle as a decline in traditional local methods and
aesthetics. For Rosemary the outdoor spaces subject to makeover on programmes
such as Ground Force were 'shapes' which even when finished lacked any sense of
three-dimensional garden space. 'Well,' she told me, they're usually very flat aren't
they, an absolute flat square. There's plenty of spare earth, but no garden.'
Approaches to personality-interpreters
In chapter 4 I argue that media garden legislators, who addressed audiences up until the
late 1960s using an instructional mode of address, had by the later 1990s largely been
replaced by personality-interpreters. As part of the discourse of achievability which
pervaded the lifestyle media, presenters such as Anne McKevitt and Diarmund Gavin
carried only scant measures of gardening expertise. In line with the argument that
society is undergoing a transitional shift from civic to consumer culture, personality-
interpreters have became friendly well-researched consumers, interpreting the latest
shopping ideas for the would-be lifestyle gardener. However, those who interpreted
lifestyle as an erosion of traditional garden aesthetics and knowledges, tended to be
unreceptive to the friendly advice of media garden presenters. My group of gardeners,
with their roots in a relatively stable semi-industrial community had investments in
the continuation of traditional gardening as a way of life. As a result, most of them
tended to bemoan the demise of the instructional, public service gardener.
Several of the gardeners I spoke to had a wistful nostalgia for late 1960s gardeners
such as Percy Thrower and Peter Smith. When I asked Geoff, for example, if he had
ever been influenced by the contemporary gardening media, he told me that he still
refers back to his 'Percy Thrower books upstairs' for help with how to garden. As
Keith told me, 'Percy Thrower and Peter Smith …they showed actual gardening
techniques and they were showing people as we were taught when we were kids.'
And many of my respondents were deeply sentimental about the late Geoff Hamilton.
Many of them spoke of their 'admiration' for a what Millie called, 'a marvellous
man'. Interestingly, as Geoff reveals below, Geoff Hamilton straddled instructional
gardening advice and lifestyle ideas:
Geoff : I tell you who we used to like, we used to watch that one, that Geoff Hamilton, that
died. He was sort of in-between, sort of serious and games really.
But perhaps the most vociferous critic of the gardening personality-interpreter was
James. James, who, at the end of his lifelong career as a professional gardener and
florist, had a great personal investment in arguing for the preservation of traditional
methods of gardening that had been his stock-in-trade. For James, contemporary
television programmes such as Gardener's World and Ground Force only serve to