Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 59

reader is left with no clue about the role these gardens had in even the everyday
lives of royalty. The researcher hoping to find a history of ordinary gardening, or
even of gardening as a daily, circadian part of the travails of the life of the wealthy,
need search elsewhere. The dimensions of ordinariness defined by Felski (2000), of
home, habit and repetition, have no place here, in these histories it is escape from the
everyday that is the raison d'être for creating gardens in the first place. For Clifford,
the great gardens are places of spiritual solace where 'man' might feel 'a sense of
awe… remote from the dulling effect of everyday experience' (1962, 19). And the
domestic ordinary garden of the lower-, middle- or working-class gardener is not
a place liberal humanist garden historians care to even think about: it is cursorily
mentioned, invites generalised scant definition, warrants numerous complaints,
but it is never analysed because it has never actually been looked at. Yet given the
dominance of liberal humanist values in Britain's chief cultural institutions, without
the sanction of liberal humanist approval, it has been, until relatively recently,
rendered a space without a respectable history.
Gardening and alternative land movements
My concern in this study is to find a history of ordinary gardening, which includes the
notion that working-class and women's gardening practices can be valued. Liberal
humanist approaches thwart that possibility, so it is to alternative land movements
that this chapter now turns.
Crouch and Ward's topic The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1999) is
a socialist history of both British and European working-class allotments. In this
sense it forms a challenge to liberal humanist conceptions of garden history and
one can see the historical antecedents of early left-culturalism in its themes and
concerns. The topic charts the development of the allotment movement since the
early 1800s, examining the economic, political and social history of the plot. Like
the nineteenth century development of trade unions, friendly societies and the co-
operative movement, the allotments are regarded as, 'an expression of working-class
self-help and mutual aid,' formed in direct response to the impact of the industrial
revolution (Crouch and Ward 1999, 11). The authors reclaim a forgotten history of
working-class political activism in the struggle against establishment land policies
formed by councils and local government and the capitalist aspirations of county
developers to build over allotment sites. The topic also focuses on the quotidian role
of allotment gardening in the lives of working-class people: it is an important site for
the production of food when resources are scarce; it acts as an important symbol of
working-class self-sufficiency; it is a place where 'quiet calm', peace and 'therapeutic
value' from the noise and oppression of everyday life can be found and it plays a
role in the expression of individual and collective identities. Allotments, for Crouch
and Ward, are characterised by a particular kind of social connection, one based on
the 'gift relationship' within what they call a 'culture of reciprocity'. Working-class
allotment holders, they argue, have historically established communal bonds based
on giving away home-grown produce to needy neighbours and other community
members. As a result, a set of mutual bonds which bind working-class communities
also help to strengthen the political dimension of working-class community activism.