Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 68

culture largely because the suburban home has enabled, 'popular expression in
housing tastes' and because both working-class people and ethnic minorities have
enjoyed a rising standard of living because of the suburbs. Suburbs have been a
success according to Clapson because they have arguably enabled working-class
people to 'have'.
By contrast, Sophie Chevalier's (1998) work takes the suburban garden in the
1990s as the central focus of her study. Chevalier conducted interviews with a small
sample of white-collar and retired factory workers on 'Jersey Farm', a suburban
estate in St. Albans. Originally, she set out to gather data on home interiors and
extended her study out to include the garden; as a result, her work concentrates on
the relationship between the domestic interior and the garden. But whereas in this
study I define the private garden as a peculiarly hybrid interface between the private/
domestic and public/civic space, Chevalier conceptualises the garden squarely on
the side of the domestic realm, the garden is, 'a British space firmly located within
domesticity' (Chevalier 1998, 47).
Chevalier identifies a structuralist typology of the suburban garden. For her
informants the front garden acts as, 'the presentation of the household, an identity
marker' while the back is both an individual and familial space where one can
express what she describes as 'being at home' (1998, 49). The most salient feature
of her argument however, is that there is what she calls 'strong symmetry' between
the interior decor of the house and the garden (1998, 51). The garden acts as the
correlative to the lounge: just as the suburban lounge has standard elements which
have a set spatial organisation - the television, three-piece suite and the woollen carpet
- the garden has a lawn, flower beds and fences which are composed in a particular
'architectural disposition.' Furthermore, Chevalier also found that the content of the
gardens she visited were also alike: sheds in all cases contained tools and mowers
and the gardens she visited were devoted to flowers and (mostly evergreen) shrubs.
Effectively, her argument is that suburban gardens are comprised of a standardised
template. Chevalier extends her argument - suburbanites, even across the Atlantic,
conceptualise their lounge and garden in similar ways both in their production and
in the ways in which they are maintained and consumed. For example, she cites
Jenkins (1994) who shows that USA post-Second World War advertising for lawn
mowers were covertly compared to vacuum cleaners and explicit parallels were
drawn between the carpet and the lawn.
Methodologically Chevalier's work is interesting. She uses the voices of her
informants to convey the experiences and values of ordinary gardeners. She makes
an important point, for example, about the distance that exists between everyday
gardeners and Latin nomenclature. Using Thomas (1983), she argues that since
the late eighteenth century and the introduction of Linneus's classification, the gap
widened between popular and cultured ways of regarding the natural world. In
common parlance the people she interviewed tended to avoid Latin terms, rather
they named plants according to their view or touch, for example, '“rabbit's ears”
…or the “plant-with-yellow-flowers”' (1992, 52).
The valuable contribution from writing on suburbia is its preparedness to engage
with the positive nuances of ordinariness: Silverstone (1997) catches at the rhythms
and aesthetics of the fabric of the ordinary suburb; and Clapson (2000) recognises