Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 56

mentioned histories (see for example, Clifford 1962; Hadfield 1979; and Thacker
1979) seek to establish a Leavisite great tradition or historical canon of gardens. The
mission to document an Arnoldian version of the, 'best that has been thought and
known' about gardens is clear in Christopher Thacker's introduction to The History
of Gardens (1979). 'There is no end to bad gardens,' he begins, 'but we need not
mention them. My task is far happier, since I may choose the best, among vanished
and almost-vanished and existing gardens' (Thacker 1979, 7). In similar vein, Derek
Clifford elevates his history of gardens to a survey of the garden 'as a work of
art', or as a 'fine art'. The gardens that Clifford is concerned with are those which
contribute to, 'the art of living'; gardens of leisure, opulence and luxury are the
historical sites which construct his study. Plants hold no interest for Clifford, for
him, plants are merely raw materials which warrant no further discussion, 'A history
of the art of painting would be thought strange if nine-tenths of it were devoted to
the introduction of new pigments' (Clifford 1962, 15). Rather, Clifford's survey,
which reads like an art history of garden design, treats gardens as the traditional
art historian discusses the oil-painting: complete artworks judged according to the
efficacy of their internal coherence.
Clifford, Hadfield and Thacker all seek to provide a linear, cause and effect
narrative trajectory of 'great' garden design movements using the internal design
dynamics of Early Roman, Italian Renaissance, French Formal and English
Landscape gardens. These movements constitute the garden history canon. Thacker
admits to his non-European omissions, 'I have obviously not been able to cover all
the magnificent gardens which can be seen in South Africa, Ceylon, New Zealand,
much of the United States and Latin America' (Emphasis mine, 1979, 7). These
gardens need not be included, he reasons, because their antecedents only lead back
to the white European canon.
Liberal humanist commentators argue that the universal power of great culture
has the power to educate ordinary people to appreciate the sublime beauty of high
culture in ways which transcend barriers of class, race and gender. Note the emphasis
on transcendence, which acts to denigrate the idea that ordinary culture itself is not
an object of value. Liberal humanist values, still arguably the dominant value system
in British cultural institutions, tend to ignore the structural power relations which
deny some people the resources to access these forms of culture (Jordan and Weedon
1997). Moreover, canonical constructions often reflect the white bourgeoisie values
of those who construct them; as a result the canon of garden history constructed
by Thacker is a white, male, Western version of legitimate garden culture. The
eurocentrism of Thacker's text is admonished by a plea that the reader recognise that
the best culture lies innate within the art form itself; acts of choice or discrimination
on the part of the critic become overpowered by the greatness of art: 'gardens' we
are told, 'are greater than their historians, as poems and paintings tower over those
who try to explain them' (1979, 7). But if the great tradition in these garden histories
is Eurocentric, it is also unapologetically elite. The great tradition, for these writers,
is produced either by royalty or the aristocracy and constitutes a pure, essentially
elite order of white European style and artistic taste. In Bourdieu's (1986) terms,
knowledge of these versions of garden history, constitutes a rich source of cultural
capital; surely a desirable commodity for the middle-class reader.