Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 170

remind him of the severed link between the gardener and traditional gardening tools.
Neglect for how garden tools work with the soil has led to a decline in techniques for
the care and preservation of tools:
James : Today, I mean these people paddle about, you never see them come out with a
clean spade. It's always a dirty, grubby spade and its ten times harder to use. Titchmarsh
is as bad as them all. It's ten times harder because it doesn't slide in the soil and it's like a
drag, it's like a parachute, it's simply slowing you up as you're going in.
The problem with these kinds of programmes for James is that they simply lacked
instruction. From his point of view, audiences need to be shown what he termed 'the
basics':
James : They don't teach it now and they're going more gimmicky than they were. I say
they're not showing enough of the basic potting and growing. And it's time they taught
people how to garden and how to use the tools. I mean for newcomers and people new to
it, it's what they want to see.
Lifestyle gardening for the social good
To malign lifestyle as a signifier of consumer culture alone, is to choose to ignore
the attributes in factual entertainment which might promote citizenship. Moseley
(2001), for example, argues that to read the primetime shift as, 'a move from hard
to soft, from documentary to makeover, from address to citizen to consumer, from
public to private and from 'quality' to 'dumbed-down' television is to ignore the
complex issues made by that shift' (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 33). For her, lifestyle
address straddles these dualisms: viewers are 'citizen-consumers' who can, 'on a
small scale, learn to make changes, make a difference, improve the personal for the
national good' (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 34). Analysis of lifestyle programming in the
late 1990s undoubtedly revealed that lifestyle ideas hold a measure of educational
value for citizens, and while most of my respondents were too firmly bound to
their stable communities to be motivated to activate the possibilities of consumer
gardening lifestyle, many of them recognised the benevolent role of lifestyle
gardening in promoting the social good.
Of all my respondents, university-educated mother and daughter Anne and Phoebe
had the most positive response to the makeover genre, personality-interpreters and
the idea of lifestyle garden transformation. Marked out as the only respondents to
have studied higher qualifications outside of their hometown, they were people who
had experienced a sense of temporary uprootedness. In this way, they serve to support
the efficacy of Chaney's argument, that subjects open to lifestyle improvisation are
relatively destabilised. Garden lifestyle programming was positive for these women
because they could act as catalysts of creativity:
Lisa T : And what do you think of them when they're finished after a couple of days?
They've used things like stapling and decking?
Anne : I'm all for it. I think a garden helps people. I know I used to go out if I'd had a row
with Richard. I'd go outside and I'd dig. That's creating something and a lot of people