Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 67

what places, sites and spaces do official forms of literature on gardens explore? In
the first part, because of its focus on ordinariness, I examine writing on suburbia
as a means of uncovering work on gardening and the mundane. In the second, I
turn my attention to literature which explores the gardens of ordinary people, of the
disenfranchised and the homeless; could it be, that studies on ordinary gardeners
focus on gardens sited in ordinary locations?
Mundane places: studies of suburbia
Constructed out of a particular geography of modernisation and urbanisation in 1930s
Britain, suburbia has its own particular specificity. As Roger Silverstone argues, 'the
suburb is the embodiment of the same ideal … the attempt to marry town and country,
and to create for middle-classes middle cultures in middle spaces' (Silverstone 1997,
4). In this way, the material environment and architectural space of suburbia cannot
provide a located cultural and geographical context for an ethnography of a small
semi-industrial town. Practices and modes of identity are framed by the specificity
of place and suburban gardening is different from that which is practised in the small
town. However, one of the few avenues where a serious investigation of ordinariness
exists is by writers who have examined suburbia.
At the start of his introduction to the edited collection Visions of Suburbia (1997),
Roger Silverstone argues that it is through the mundanity of suburbia, as an emergent,
middling third space between the country and the city that a sense of the specificity
of place emerges: 'Yet it is precisely the ordinariness of suburban everyday life,
the rhythms and routines of day and week, commuting and housework, that the
particular character and distinctiveness of suburban culture is to be found' (1997, 9).
Indeed it is the regularity of the circadian rhythms of the everyday that lead him, in
a bid to encapsulate 'every-suburb', to begin his introduction with a portrait of the
'unique and typical' architectural layout and characteristic features of Bromley. In
this way, Silverstone shows a readiness to explore and take seriously the aesthetic
bricolage of ordinariness as embodied in the fabric of the suburban streetscape;
from the haphazard, messy architecture of the shopping precinct to the noises of
suburbia. Challenging the modernist attack on standardisation, Silverstone points
to Levittown, as an example which has become, 'a passable model of postmodern
individuality, as standardised houses have been transformed, trees and gardens
planted, and the basic structure of grid and lot has been overlaid by other designs
…Spaces, both inside and outside, are redesigned, reformed into expressions of
personal taste and identity' (Silverstone 1997, 6). His willingness to consider the
creative personal taste inflections and aesthetic differences within ordinary lower
middle-class domestic space counters the existing and extensive body of pejorative
English intellectual literature bemoaning the standardisation of suburbia (see for
example, Edwards 1981; Bedarida 1990; Lebeau 1997). The problem with the attack
on suburban architecture as Mark Clapson argues is that, 'the lives lived within these
houses are castigated as narrow-minded and trivial', such writing assumes, 'that
people live a singular 'suburban' life: a privatised, repressed and banal existence
behind the net curtains and the front gardens of the suburban home' (Clapson 2000,
151-152). Clapson argues that suburbs have made a positive contribution to English