Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 10

1999) and the question of how to deal with the difficult contradictions of being in-
between class locations is at the heart of the early texts which built cultural studies
as a discipline (Hoggart 1957; Williams 1979). These authors used autobiography
as a mode of cultural analysis through which to explore first hand experience of
working-class life through the privileged lens offered by their university education.
What one gleans from reading both Hoggart and Williams is sentient observation
and respect for the details and nuances of working-class ordinariness. Though
Williams portrays a more emotionally guarded stance than Hoggart, they were both
concerned to document their personal histories of class and they wrote about their
feelings. Both writers have been attacked - Hoggart perhaps more scurrilously than
Williams - for their humanism and for their lack of attention to the systematic rigour
of critical theory (see for example Easthope 1997). Yet as Medhurst (2000) argues,
the turn to theory in the late 1980s and the relegation of class to the margins of the
social science agenda tended to de-politicise cultural studies. In the process, facets of
working-class culture, so key to autobiographical writing about class - 'expressivity,
locality, communality, class … [became] the real casualties in the hyper-theorising
which have marked the recent trajectory of Cultural Studies' (Medhurst, 2000, 23).
Indeed, autobiography - such as the mode adopted by Hoggart, which is interwoven
into his account of working-class culture, brings an important dimension to cultural
analysis: it offers a means through which to understand lived culture; it potentially
counters the de-politicisation of cultural studies and it insists categorically that the
experiential be included. For these reasons I set this topic within the tradition of
culturalism which draws on autobiography: my own life experience of the garden
offers a means to extend my analysis to how the personal, the political and the lived
are experienced by others.
It is therefore necessary for me to place the location of myself under some kind
of spot-light. I was born into a working-class household, though I cannot claim to be
working-class now. If I use the aesthetic criteria that I show in later chapters pervades
middle-class gardening practises, I too must accept, at least a partial, middle-class
'arrival'. While I once had a taste for the tight buds of hybrid tea roses and a love of
bedding plants, today I have only the large, loosely formed, scented Gallica, Musk
and English roses, which are prized by middle-class consumers. As an academic,
I pursue, at least culturally, a middle-class profession which has a middle-class
income attached. But like many academics who have been working-class, I occupy a
curious, 'in-between' type of location (Hoggart 1957; Mahony and Zmroczek 1997;
Medhurst 2000; Skeggs 1997). For one's class location is never just about where one
stands in the present; to label myself 'working-class' would not fit, yet to be seen
as 'middle-class' would not be entirely 'right' either. Class, as Medhurst argues is,
'a question of identifications, perceptions, feelings' and I can only agree with the
feeling he describes in announcing his own class identity as, 'uncertain, torn and
oscillating - caught on a cultural cusp' (Medhurst 2000, 20).
Being 'in-between' is a strange location, but it offers certain kinds of insights
for the cultural analyst conducting this type of study. Gripsrud (1989) argues that
previously-working-class academics have 'double-access' to both high and popular
forms of culture. Academic training means that they have the competence to be
able to consume both high and low cultural forms, even though the relationship