Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
time, respect for the seasons, authentic garden knowledge and methodical labour
- then so be it. Experientially, they regarded the move to lifestyle as a decline in
traditional local methods and aesthetics. David, for example, suggested that lifestyle
media ideas, with their preference for convenience gardening, were serving to render
traditional garden features obsolete: 'they're doing away with lawns 'cos they're too
difficult.' For him this has had an impact on the aesthetic look of gardens - he added,
'but you're loosing the green, aren't you?'
Sentimental capital is a type of emotional capital which acts as resource of self-
valuing. It was a specifically working-class resource because of its sociality, its
emphasis on traditional passed-down practices which were shared, sympathetically
within a community and because it was embedded within a tradition of sentimental
oral testimony. Gardening with sentimental capital, with its emphasis on nostalgia and
gardening in the past also meant that working-class aesthetics, like the sentimental
feelings they evoke, are also rehearsed repeatedly, with very little change. In these
ways, it continues to produce gardening as a 'way of life' - continually repeated
through practice to honour previous historical traditions of clean earth, of colour
through bedding plants and through high ethical approaches to caring for the soil. In
these ways, the tight grip on traditional working-class tastes and skills enabled my
respondents to build an alternative value system that fostered an emotional politics
of resistance to consumerism and national lifestyle aesthetics.
Conclusion to the topic
This topic began autobiographically by considering my classed and gendered position
in relation to the ordinary enthusiasm of gardening in the mid 1990s. It explores the
gaps that appeared between my (once) working-class gardening competencies and
the taste cultures promulgated by television and media culture of the late 1990s. It
demonstrates what I had long suspected: that the private domestic garden, a mundane
consumption site attached to most peoples' homes, is a space where class and gender
are continually made and re-made.
Using empirical detail, the topic has traced some of the lived processes through
which class and gender pervade gardening as a mundane hobby. Using an inter-
disciplinary theoretical framework, it charts the historical antecedents of gendered
practices and working-class regulation through autobiography of my own family's
classed and gendered gardening on a Yorkshire council estate since the mid 1950s,
and a larger socio-historical backcloth of popular gardening since the nineteenth
century.
The topic has examined how the garden has been legislated in official histories
as a means of geographically and historically locating the empirical data. Arguing
that most official histories have ignored the ordinary and the working-class, the
topic turns to recent social history of the private domestic garden as a means of
framing its findings. As such, my hope is that this topic has made a contribution to
that growing literature, recording as it does, the voices and experiences of ordinary
gardeners - a group often marginalised from official accounts. In this way, it has
documented a finite moment in British 1990s cultural history. It offers a small-scale,
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