Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 66

make assertions about female garden aesthetics without offering any analysis of the
specific kind of gardening vocabulary male and female gardeners draw upon.
However, Christine Dann's (1992) work on gendered gardening in New Zealand
makes a series of interesting claims about the differences between men and women's
gardening practices. Dann's source material is drawn from personal observation,
informal letters and interviews with fifty cottage gardeners in Christchurch. Dann
argues that women gravitate towards herbs and they appreciate a wide variety of
flowers; by contrast men are interested in vegetables and bedding plants and they
tend towards connoisseurship or collecting. Perhaps more interestingly, Dann claims
that women have a relaxed approach to garden design, whereas men, whose flowers
are often placed in 'mathematical rows' possess a, 'rigid and unimaginative style
of flower gardening' (1992, 239). Men, she asserts, are competent with fertilisers
and sprays, are interested in public floral display (hence their love of bedding), but
they face limitations in relation to garden design and philosophy. Ultimately, Dann's
argument is that female aesthetics offer a more valuable contribution to the practice of
gardening. However, the fact that these practices are also classed tends to escape the
reach of Dann's argument. My ethnographic findings reveal similar types of practices
undertaken by male and female gardeners in private gardens in West Yorkshire, but
while Dann suggests that regimentation, clinical tidiness and a love of bedding plants
are gendered preferences, I argue that these tendencies demonstrate a classed garden
aesthetic which cross-cuts issues of gender. More usefully, Dann's work refuses the
import of an essentialising radical feminist perspective on gardening differences.
However, she tends to avoid any theoretical engagement, even for example with a
social constructionist perspective, as to why gendered gardening practices exist.
Writers such as Groag-Bell, MacLeod and Dann offer an important contribution
to existing garden scholarship: they work to reclaim a 'forgotten' history of women's
gardening. They counter the tendency of historians to write women out of history and
present them as either unimportant, or simple victims of historical processes. What
these histories tend to leave intact however, are the fundamental assumptions of
the liberal humanist tradition of celebrating 'great' individuals. As a result, feminist
garden histories tend to replace the gender blind category of great people with great
women. Great male legislators are merely replaced by great female legislators. In
these histories 'women' is cited as a homogeneous category which claims to speak
on behalf of all women - class as an analytic category is ignored. Yet as these texts
reveal, the women who people these garden histories are middle-class or aristocratic
women who have access to the resources which enable them to aspire to liberal
definitions of greatness. As a result working-class contributions to garden history,
or to the historical formation of gardening as a cultural practice are entirely missing
from these accounts. Yet class as a category of identity difference is an identity which
has significant impact and value in relation to gendered aesthetics of gardening.
Place
So far this chapter has analysed how gardens and gardeners are officially represented
in garden history. In this section, I investigate the where of garden writing. I ask: