Using Sentimental Capital: Class, Emotion and Value - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 182

of popular memory, the cultural equivalent of the museums…and other monuments of
middle-class history (Lusted 1995, 186).
He goes on to argue that telling stories about cultural practices is often infused by
sentimentality as a means of holding together a historical sense of community:
For working-class communities without resources and organisation to build monuments
to their own class histories, oral history becomes crucial in popular memory which must
bear witness through stories of communal traditions and practices … sentiment is the
affective agency which works to bind listeners into a common community and class
memory (Lusted 1995, 187).
In these ways, gardening practices and traditions, as told through the sentiments of
oral testimony, become historical monuments to working-class history and culture.
I turn now to discussions of lifestyle television culture where sentimental capital
was drawn upon as a means of both decrying lifestyle culture and allowing my
respondents to rehearse sentimental emotions about how gardens and gardening
should be. In these informal semi-structured interviews I asked my respondents what
they thought of the aesthetics promulgated by lifestyle programmes and if they drew
on the resources offered by lifestyle in their gardening.
The Uses of Sentimental Capital
Most of them interpreted lifestyle garden ideas as undesirable and symbolic of a
wider, lamentable decline in traditional, authentic garden practices. Some respondents
reacted quite violently to the mention of the garden make-over genre. As David
remarked:
David : It's since this blooming Force came on.
Lisa T : Ground Force ?
David : I think it's blooming awful.
And John told me, 'I've seen two or three programmes and I think “garbage”'.
For many of them 'real' gardening was a pursuit that required the investment of
time. The make-over was therefore seen as 'instant' and had very little to do with
gardening in the true sense. Authentic gardening was a pursuit that took many years
of perseverance, and those who gardened 'instantly' simply had not earned the right
to be called 'gardeners'. For David, who still lived in the house where he was born
and which his parents had occupied, the garden had been a lifelong project:
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 …