Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 57

Problematically, these histories tell the reader almost nothing about what great
gardens meant, either for their owners or for those who consumed them. The
patrician voices of these writers are more attuned to providing design tradition
connoisseurship than they are with enabling the reader to understand the social
and cultural use or meaning of gardens in the past. Thacker's drive to locate every
garden into a tendency or movement leads him to categorise Biddulph Grange - the
British nineteenth century garden which leads the visitor through a fantastical world
tour of juxtaposed scenes - as an 'eclectic garden.' In doing so he blocks off any
understanding of the garden's role as a symbolic marker for social standing and
status. Yet there are arguably more useful ways of theorising garden aesthetics.
Mukerji's (1990) materialist analysis of the French formal garden, for example,
insists on understanding the relationship between capitalist economic development
and conspicuous plant collection and consumption. At particular historical moments
traditional sources of rank are weakened by new economic and political forms
of power, at those junctures, she uses Bourdieu (1986) to argue that people use
consumption to lay claims to social standing. For Mukerji, seventeenth century
courtly gardens are much more than examples of consistent historically specific
design principles, they were also used for, 'creating, declaring, and reading claims
about social station' (Mukerji 1990, 652). Biddulph Grange, a garden that marked
what Geoffrey Jellicoe (1975) was to call, 'a new era of British internationalism,'
was created by James Bateman and Edward Cooke in the 1830s. It comprises a
rocky Scottish glen; a Wellingtonia walk; 'China' - including rhododendrons from
Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal; the 'Italianate'; and 'Egypt' which comprises sphinxes,
a topiary pyramid, and the 'Ape of Troth'. This garden amounts to far more than an
eclectic juxtaposition of different aesthetic styles; the presentation and arrangement
of petted exotic plants, the pursuit of which explorers such as David Douglas had
literally given their lives, communicated the supremacy of the British colonial
empire and acted as markers of the impressive international power and reach of their
owners. Seen in this context, Clifford's curt dismissal of the significance of plants to
garden history, ('plant growing is not gardening' he argues (1962, 18)), seems almost
risible. As Mukerji points out, orangeries and stoves (heated glass houses) were built
precisely for the purpose of displaying prized exotics so that gardens could, 'be seen
as collector's maps' conferring, 'God-like power to control the elements' (Mukerji
1990, 657) onto their owners. Yet in order to arrive at this kind of reading the shift in
focus must move from reading the textual mechanisms of a chronology of artworks
as part of art movements, to thinking about the importance of their consumption.
Interestingly, the drive towards producing a final chapter on great gardens of
the twentieth century proves difficult for liberal humanist garden historians. Writing
the present as though its achievements are somehow commensurate with the past
is impossible given the influence of popular culture and mass consumption. While
Hadfield acknowledges that 'the real feature of the twentieth century was the growth
of a huge suburbia of small houses,' (1979, 428) he devotes only three paragraphs
to suburban gardens in a 454 page text. He bemoans the salient feature of suburban
gardens: standardisation, 'They are but of one general type … an almost invariably
rectangular patch covering but a few square yards' (ibid.). The twentieth century
common-law gardener becomes indistinguishable from his house, garden, and