Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 11

with popular culture is no longer what it was. Double access, for Gripsrud, can
only be an advantage, for previously-working-class academics have a type of lived
access to popular texts which middle-class academics can never have. Similarly,
Medhurst argues that his status as a 'once-working-class' academic affords him 'an
understanding of how culture works' and, as a result, what he calls 'experiential
literacy' in relation to popular media texts (Medhurst 2000, 33). In similar vein, my
marginal, once-working-class location affords its own insights: the theoretical tools
garnered in academic life can enable an understanding of a long-standing personal
history of working-class everyday practises and aesthetics. However, I have come
to middle-class aesthetics along a rather more complex route: while academic study
of English literature, art history and so on affords a particular type of access to high
culture, I have had to learn afresh the rules governing lived middle-class garden
aesthetics in the field. The researcher may bring experiential knowledge of certain
class locations, but the researcher may also feel a lack of confidence, ignorance and
perhaps even a measure of incompetence in the social field.
Yet the experiential is connected to things that scholarly academic writing in
the social sciences has traditionally been uneasy about, or at least has fought hard
to underplay: feelings and emotion (Hetherington 1998). Yet when I look at the
photograph of the garden where I spent those early years (see Figure 2.1) I feel
the jolt of a clutch of emotions which remind me of the gendered dimension of my
autobiography. The garden reminds me of an (almost) lost female family line who all
made some investment in the garden: grandmother brought her nursery knowledge
and tastes to bear on the look of the garden, my aunt Ella brought cuttings and
plants from the places she rented in as a textile worker during the war. And the
garden reminds me of passed down preferences and forms of ordinary gardening
knowledge that have passed from grandmother, through to my mother and down to
me. So predominantly, I feel a sense of loss in relation to locality, community and
belonging - aspects of working-class culture, which I am convinced once left can
never be fully re-imbursed. For when my mother married in 1979 and we packed my
step father's car with belongings, I remember a street of people waved us off - and
I was never to experience a sense of local community of that kind again. So what I
really feel when I look at those early photographs of the garden are those emotions
for which Hoggart and others who have written about their own personal histories
of working-class life have been reproached: nostalgia and sentimentality. Yet these
emotions are in part about valuing working-class life. Hoggart himself knew that his
autobiographical work was open to attack for 'sentimental over-valuing', but as he
argues, sentimentality is an emotional risk one must take if, 'we are to get away from
the … attitude which thinks of working-class people as almost blank slates, with
none of the rich and elaborate manners of the middle and upper classes' (Hoggart
1958, 132). These kinds of emotions are also important for keeping the motivation
for the politics of class and gender alive. I return to sentimentality and the garden
more fully in the final chapter of the topic.
But most significantly, the location of the emotional self has an important impact
on the type of research that one can produce. So that some of the strong feelings that
I have had in the ethnographic research process - sentimentality and sympathy for
working-class respondents and feelings of irritation and even anger at middle-class