Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 58

neighbours. A single paragraph covers all suburban gardens, because the description
of one stands for all. The design features or the aesthetics of these gardens - even
standardised characteristics - are not deemed worthy of discussion. Similarly, for
Clifford, the twentieth century is characterised by the fall of the artist who creates
private artworks to the rise of the professional who manages public parks or the
gardens of civic buildings. Garden artists of the past from high cultural quarters
conversant with poetry, painting and architecture have given way to mere professionals
whose techniques for, 'needs which are principally hygienic and sociological' can
be acquired through training (Clifford 1962, 213). Domestic gardens are given short
shrift in a single paragraph, where Clifford bemoans the lack of space in the city
garden, the lack of time for the commuting suburban gardener and the battle of
competition popular culture pitches against gardening as a pastime more generally
(Clifford 1962, 212). The ordinary suburban garden can never aspire to be part of the
canon for liberal humanist garden writers.
The historical antecedents of the 'culture and civilisation' tradition are firmly
present in liberal humanist conceptions of garden history. More recent texts
demonstrate their continued popularity and dominance (see for example Brown 1999).
Principally, their aim is to legislate garden taste and culture. In Bourdieusian (1986)
fashion, these histories package legitimated forms of gardening knowledge which are
high in cultural capital. Tradeable for middle-class readers, such knowledge - about
the 'right' gardening movements and the 'best' gardens in the 'right' locations - can
be reconverted in the field for high symbolic returns. Manuals for the acquisition of
cultural capital, these kinds of texts show that knowledge of High garden Culture
functions as a form of social distinction for its readers.
Liberal humanist garden histories also function as a form of symbolic violence
(Bourdieu 1990a). 1 Often misrecognised as legitimate historical accounts, they
impose bourgeoisie values about which shall be the most treasured gardens in history
could be forgiven for thinking that the only gardens worthy of documentation are
canonised artworks. The pedagogic action of symbolic violence, as Jenkins (2002)
reminds us, often works most effectively through practices of exclusion or by
treating some ideas as though they were 'unthinkable'. To be sure, these accounts
leave whole swathes of garden history - for example working-class gardening,
the practices of the garden labourers who built and maintained 'great' gardens and
female gardeners - out of the historical picture. The message is clear: only elite
garden history is of value. In these ways, liberal humanist texts serve to re-inscribe
the uneven distribution of cultural capital, they reproduce the cultural formation,
thereby serving the interests of the dominant group.
Gardening and its relationship with ordinariness and everyday life are also
thought too trivial and inconsequential for mention in these histories. Even the
quotidian practices that the aristocracy put to these sites is excluded, so that the
1 In this sense they join the other historical and contemporary instances of symbolic
violence charted in this study. The will to educate working-class women about home taste in
the 1950s (as charted in chapter 2), and the ways in which the contemporary media at the time
this study was conducted, ignored local working-class gardening competencies in favour of
bourgeoisie tastes.