Using Sentimental Capital: Class, Emotion and Value - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 178

feelings about their conception of traditional gardening that came through some of
their pejorative and at times quite angry views about garden lifestyle make-over
television. But many of them were routine, embedded into the diurnal rhythms of
gardening practice and were felt most especially by my working-class gardeners who
gardened in resource constrained contexts. To give you a flavour of gardening with
sentimental attachments, there were three key areas of emotion. Firstly, there were
sentimental practices of what the garden meant for the working-class gardeners
of the study . To my working-class gardeners there was a desire to keep gardening
a community endeavour within the context of relatively few economic resources.
Particular aesthetic codes of how gardens, especially at the front, should look, were
adhered to:
Keith: With it being a row of terraced …everybody has a garden and you tend to fit in
with everybody else
Lisa : And you wouldn't want to grow veg in the front garden?
Keith : Well no I don't, I mean it might be unsightly to some people. They might think,
'What a strange place to put them.'
Seeds, cuttings and perennial plants were exchanged and freely given in a context
where high ethical ideals of caring and sharing in the community were both held and
acted upon.
Keith : I don't think it was too much that everyone went out and got packets of seeds …
they used to swap plants did't neighbours and that's where I got it from.
And there were dignified, ideal standards of tidiness and respectability that meant
enormous investments in how peoples' gardens looked (see chapter 6). Then there
were sentimental practices formed out of passed down familial gardening practices .
Respondents' parents had transmitted tastes for plants, and had expended time and
effort in passing their own skills about how to sow seeds or grow vegetables - to
the people of the study. Several respondents expressed wistful and nostalgic feelings
when they related how their mother and fathers had taught them how to garden (see
chapter 7). 'I'm glad he was vegetables' David said of his father. And Stephanie
talked about a female line of flower appreciation:
Stephanie: Grandma always 'ad flowers in 't house and me mum as tended to go that way
a bit, and then I've always liked things like that, so it's kind of gone down in generations
with us.
And finally, there were sentimental feelings that arose out of condemnation of the
make-over and its conventions which were channelled back to deeply sentimental
ideas about old-fashioned gardening practices in the past. It was here where my
respondents held me in dialogue about what they thought gardening should be
about. It is in these exchanges where mutual valuing and 'talking back' to lifestyle
is located. I return to a more detailed analysis of this data in relation to lifestyle
consumption later.