Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 65

gardening tasks themselves. And through an examination of the journals and letters
of an upper-class gardener such as the traveller and writer Celia Fiennes, Groag-Bell
identifies the specific interests of female gardeners of the time; Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, for example, was interested in incorporating natural terrain into the garden
and had a passion for flowers. Other important female gardeners that people Groag-
Bell's history include Lady Mary Coke, Hannah More, Sarah Ponsonby, Harriet
Stratfield and Elizabeth Cottrell Dormer. In this way, she is able to construct a female
history of previously hidden eighteenth century female gardening as well as evidence
of female gardening as a physical activity that some of these women pursued.
Dawn MacLeod's topic Down-to-Earth-Women: Those Who Care for the Soil
(1982) is similarly devoted to the construction of a specifically female garden
history. Describing the lives and achievements of mostly twentieth century female
gardeners, MacLeod tells the story of early 'humble' gardeners and nuns; celebrated
garden innovators such as Gertrude Jekyll; pioneering specialists, for instance, the
herb farmer Margaret Brownlow; garden preservationists such as Octavia Hill, co-
founder of The National Trust; and influential professionals who, with horticultural,
scientific or botanic qualifications, managed to set up women-only training schools,
like for example Studley College in Warwickshire (founded in 1910), in order to pave
the way for new aspiring female gardeners. In this way, MacLeod's topic examines
the ways in which women have extended their gardening skills and knowledge for
use in commerce, education and historic preservation.
What these feminist histories share is a belief that men and women garden
differently in ways which produce a gendered gardening aesthetics. While all-male
renowned landscape designers focused on the construction of natural terrain using
lakes, hills and Greco-Roman classical motifs and statuary, Bell argues that women
grew herbs and plants for medicinal use and had kept alive the female tradition of
flower growing since the Middle Ages. A specifically female enjoyment of flowers,
shrubs and walks characterised female aesthetic appreciation and creativity during
this period.
In like manner, MacLeod also argues for the existence of female garden
aesthetics, though her analysis extends male and female gardening differences out
to essential gendered characteristics. In this way, the influence of radical feminism,
with its belief in a fixed, transcultural and biologistic notion of gendered subjecthood
can be seen to exert an influence on MacLeod's conception of gendered gardening
practices (see for example, Griffin (1981), and Dworkin (1981)). 'Man,' she argues
in her preface, 'likes to dominate and impose his own will upon the smaller fry
of existence (at times on his own kind too), whereas woman through centuries of
motherhood has learned to appreciate life in all its manifestations' (1982, ix). For
MacLeod, men's gardening is tainted by their destructive and competitive nature;
their desire to garden is often confined to the pursuit of money or fame. Women
on the other hand, characterised by the desire to nurture and care for the soil, share
one thing in common: 'a strong love of the earth and its growing plants, a devotion
in which desire for personal power and prestige has had very little place' (ibid.).
MacLeod extends her thesis to gardens, arguing that, 'Certain gardens could only
have been made by a woman' (1982, x) - though no real rationale is given to inform
the reader why this is so. One of the problems with MacLeod's topic is that it tends to