Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 62

Modern landscape citizenship came to depend on methods of regulation which
sought to cultivate the correct ways of being and seeing in landscape. This rested
on attempting to instil amongst the landscape public the right social and aesthetic
distinctions. In 1928 the Council for the Preservation of Rural England for
example, advanced its 'Anti-Litter Campaign' using a satirical postcard displaying
two docile picnickers checking their litter before they leave, “Better have a look
round among our litter and see we haven't left anything be'ind,” reads the caption.
Similarly an informal Country Code was designed, its specific aims to encourage
gate closing, litter disposal and to appoint officers for the surveillance of potentially
unruly countryside users. Seeing the landscape was also regulated by practices of
observation, mapping and orienteering; the construction of an 'intellectual, spiritual
and physical citizenship' depended on producing observant citizens via survey.
Sharp observation was part of the walking code for scouts, as Matless demonstrates:
'a dibdobbery of observant walking emerges: “Remember that it is a disgrace to a
Scout if, when he is with other people, they see anything big or little, near or far, high
or low, that he has not already seen for himself”' (Matless 1998, 75). Only certain
practices and particular kinds of people were fit for the preservationist movement's
idea of the English countryside.
Several of the ideas in Matless's thesis about landscape are germane to the
themes of gardening culture under discussion in this study: he demonstrates that the
preservationist movement's vision of landscape was shot through with aesthetic and
social class distinctions and he shows the means by which the working-class were
regulated in an attempt to make them landscape citizens.
Undoubtedly, these examples from the alternative land movement offer an
advance on liberal humanist garden history. Both Crouch and Ward (1999) and
Matless (1998) are attentive to the power relations of class: Crouch and Ward
(1999) value the working-class to the extent that they centre their account around its
community, both trace historically how working-class consumption of land plots and
the landscape have been subject to forms of middle-class surveillance; and Matless
(1998) demonstrates how approaches to landscape are shot through with practices
of social distinction.
Given these attributes it is therefore unfortunate that neither of these studies
actually centres on the private, ordinary domestic garden. Crouch and Ward (1999)
centre on a personal space that is removed from the domestic and the private and they
offer no real analysis of the relationship between the allotment and the garden. And,
while Matless (1998) explores a number of themes and ideas which are germane
to my study - ideas around land, culture, soil, aesthetic and social distinctions, the
representation and regulation of the working-class in relation to land - he makes
absolutely no mention of gardens.
Nonetheless these are studies that allow admission to the ordinary. Matless' study
probes the most mundane quarters of the English landscape. And The Allotment:
Its Landscape and Culture (1999) marks an attempt to document, historicise and
somehow value the quotidian gardening experiences of ordinary working people in
the context of their communities. However, its analysis shows discomfort with the
ordinary. In its leftist quest to establish the allotment movement as an alternative
working-class subculture it tends to focus on the transformative potential of the