Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 16

the contemporary garden journalist Christopher Lloyd 1 (1984) warns the would-be
gardener against. Yet the garden in the photograph, the garden where I spent my
early childhood with my mother and grandparents, was admired and valued by local
people in the community. Indeed my mother told me that a neighbour 'couldn't
resist' taking the slide because, 'he thought the garden looked so colourful'.
In this way, the garden where I grew up was expressive of a distinctive set of
classed garden aesthetics. It drew on the ordinary language of gardening specific
to the north of Britain in the mid-1950s. My grandparents used their own classed,
historical knowledge of gardening passed down from their parents; they looked to
the plants they had seen as council tenants in other peoples' gardens; they used
the local municipal park as a reference point for some of their planting schemes;
grandma brought ideas back from Wells's plant nursery where she had worked since
the 1940s and they watched Percy Thrower's Gardening Club (BBC, 1956-), on the
television set they had newly purchased in 1953 for the Queen's coronation. Their
gardening allusions were not drawn from the language of modernism lauded at the
time by the middle-class design establishment - like, for example, Sir Frederick

Figure 2.2 Standing in Front of the Hydrangeas, 1969

1 Christopher Lloyd has written a number of influential topics about how to select
tasteful plants for the garden, see for example, The Well-Chosen Garden (1984). Lloyd
owns the celebrated house and garden 'Great Dixter' in Surrey, and describes himself as a
'plantsman'. He has a long-standing career as a gardening journalist in middle-class quarters
of the British press such as The Guardian .