Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 15

Chapter 2

Histories and Context

My First Garden: A Case Study of Ordinary Classed and Gendered Aesthetics

The photograph (see Figure 2.1) shows a back garden on a council estate in West
Yorkshire in the mid-1950s. If you look closely, in the borders there are carnations

Figure 2.1 The Thornton Garden, Stoney Lane Council Estate, 1954

and some orange hybrid tea roses, the kind bred and aggressively marketed for
working-class consumers in the 1950s (Harkness 1978). A mop-head hydrangea
resides in the far corner. The parameters, set in place by the council estate planners
- concrete posts and green chicken wire - act as an early fencing system until the
ubiquitous privet hedge was to grow up to the desired height. But the central feature
of this garden is the rectangle of nemesias in the centre of the lawn. Drawing on a
design reminiscent of municipal park planting schemes, the idea of a central bed in
the middle of the lawn is a typically working-class aesthetic trope. The lawn acts
as a frame for the summer pride of the working-class garden: the bedding plants
that create a riot of colour at its centre. Subsequent summers would see the same
bed full of roses and edged by bedding plants - precisely the planting scheme that