Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 25

Although my family were not as conscientious as Mr. Moore next door, who my
mother told me was 'regimented, tidy - cut his lawn with scissors', I was told that
they 'kept up to it'. My family were no more immune to the incitement to keep the
garden tidy, and by implication respectable, than any other working-class family on
the Stoney Lane estate. Preston's (1995) evidence of council stipulations cited above
on council estates in both east and south-west London in the 1930s was clearly
extended to north England counties. When the Thorntons moved into their house
in 1951 they were given a tenant's handbook which stipulated regulations on house
occupancy, regulations on pets and there were rules about the garden. From memory
my mother was able to recall local council rules that insisted on clipped hedges and
a regularly mown lawn with neat edges. But beyond what was written down, my
family and the other working people who lived there understood that a discourse of
respectability, held dear as a model of 'how to be' by most working-class tenants,
pervaded the atmosphere of the estate. And it was these expectations that made
the front garden - the space which the critical gaze of passers-by could so easily
judge - the focus of respectability for these working-class gardeners. 'You're more
concerned with the front in a way,' my mother told me.
But while estate regulations testify to some working-class dissent, evidence
suggests that most people wanted gardens (Clapson 2000, 157) and social
investigators found in a pre-Second World War survey that 85 per cent of people kept
their gardens in a good to fair condition. There are various views on why gardening
became increasingly popular. Preston (1995) argues - with some credence - that
gardening is linked to English national identity and that it offered a link with an
old and specifically English rural idyll, so that gardens became representative of,
'England and its historic tradition as a whole, linking modern lifestyles with the past
through the ancient English landscape, a mythical 'green and pleasant land' with
values deeply rooted in the national soil' (Preston 1995, 69). Constantine (1981)
argues that socially aspirational working-class gardeners welcomed the opportunity
to 'emulate' higher social groups. This topic, however, argues that working-class
people have been far more concerned with developing their own aesthetics in
relation to popular enthusiasms. Bourke's (1994) exploration of working-class
autobiography, offers perhaps the most useful means of understanding the social
changes that 'positioned', in particular, working-class men to enjoy gardening.
She argues that improvements in inter-war housing had a significant impact on the
investment husbands were prepared to make in domestic labour. Travelling to and
from work encouraged the view of the home as, 'a secluded, self-contained domain
… a respectable domestic front had to be maintained because “there's more pass
by than comes in”' (Bourke 1994, 84). Everyday life on housing estates made for
fundamental changes in the division of domestic labour - investigators reported that
husbands on housing estates were more co-operative than many working-class men.
They were more prepared to help around the house with cleaning and childcare, but
more significantly, 'manly housework' became increasingly centred on gardening
and do-it-yourself. As the following oral account from a man on the Dagenham estate
illustrates: 'Down here a man makes an art of having something to do in his home
when he gets back from work' (Bourke 1994, 85). Bourke extends her point further,
arguing that men simply, ' had to do housework to maintain acceptable standards