Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 63

collective working-class rather than accepting ordinary people on their own terms.
This would explain its focus on an alternative site - the allotment - at the expense
of the individual, private, ordinary domestic garden. The Left have been attacked for
being interested only in the politically conscious working-class and cultural studies
for attempting to find active and positive forms of subcultural resistance in working-
class culture (Walkerdine 1997, 20). As a result the ordinariness and mundanity - the
coping, living, dreaming and hoping of working-class life - is rendered invisible as
a result:
what is important to me is to be able to talk not about subcultures or resistance, or an
audience making its continually resistant readings, but about the ordinary working
people, who have been coping and surviving, who are formed at the intersection of these
competing claims to truth, who are subjects formed in the complexities of everyday
practices…I want to talk about people who cannot easily be characterised as part of a
politicized working-class, nor resistant subcultures, the ordinary people that the Left
seemed to forget (Walkerdine 1997, 21).
Moreover, omitting the private and the domestic in favour of the public,
politicised alternative allotment movement means that although the authors strive
to deny it, Crouch and Ward (1999) tend to offer a predominantly male alternative
history of working-class community. Allotments and their sheds they suggest have
occasionally been sites where men go precisely to escape the domestic - 'getting
away from the wife and children' was one man's reason for holding an allotment
according to the Thorpe Report (Crouch and Ward 1997, 90). While this kind of
text goes much further towards offering a history of ordinary gardening than those
with liberal humanist values, working-class women are only partially mentioned,
and once again, the space, meaning, and aesthetic tendencies of the ordinary garden
are circumvented in the drive to capture the political ethos of a land movement. The
private, individual garden - a space which belies the drive to be read as a public
land protest is perhaps too mundane, too conformist to be of real interest to leftist
critics.
People
So far this chapter has examined how gardens have been represented in particular
dominant versions of garden history. This section turns to the people of gardening.
Reviewing both liberal humanist and feminist approaches to gardening, I ask: what
gardeners are considered worthy of being named as the most valued and celebrated
gardeners? And what are the consequences for those unnamed in official histories?
Great white men: the liberal humanist approach
The movements of innovation which characterise liberal humanist accounts of
garden history are attributed to the work of 'great' gardeners or gardening genius.
The histories by Thacker, Clifford, Hadfield, and Scott-James and Lancaster (1977),
as well as more recent texts by Brown (1999), contain a tacit canonised agreement