Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Ordinariness and History
Introduction
This topic asks how classed and gendered identities are played out
in the ordinary
garden
. Turning to sources which take the garden as its focus, this chapter critically
reviews an inter-disciplinary range of literature as a means of asking how British
gardens, gardeners and gardening practices are documented. The first section,
'Histories' examines what are arguably culturally dominant approaches to garden,
landscape and allotment history; it then turns to the gardeners who people those
histories and movements. The second, 'People', looks at the types of garden spaces
and sites that are documented in garden history. The third section examines relatively
new scholarship on the social history of the private home garden. And finally, arguing
that gardens have been important consumption sites which communicate meaning
about their owners, the third section looks at a number of case studies on gardens
which perform symbolic work.
The core of this topic is centred around my own ethnographic findings on class,
gender, gardeners and identity, which are to found in this study. Using a group of
people from a small provincial semi-industrial town in West Yorkshire, I interviewed
and gardened with the people of my study in the context of their own ordinary gardens.
Yet the distinctive set of gardening practices which I found are historically produced
and materially grounded. All practices in this sense are historically contingent and
located. In order to understand the emergence of particular practices and what makes
them distinctive and meaningful they need to be historicised and geographically
located. This chapter aims to ask whether the existing literature drawn from
disciplines such as garden history, women's studies, cultural geography, sociology,
cultural, urban and rural landscape studies and design and social history can provide
an adequate contextual backdrop for understanding the symbolic meaning of the
ordinary garden practices which are manifest in private domestic gardens in a small
town in the North of England.
Approaches to Garden History: Great Gardens, Allotments and Landscape
Liberal humanist approaches to garden history
Much of the extant literature on gardens is underscored by a liberal humanist
approach to gardens in the past. The most comprehensive, respected and oft-
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