Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 69

that an ordinary location like the suburb allowed working-class people access to
decent living standards and offered them space for their own aesthetic expression.
Yet despite their willingness to engage positively with the aesthetics of suburbia
and despite the endless references to the semiotic significance of the suburban front
garden and lawn, neither of these writers engages in any sustained analysis of the
suburban garden . For example, in an almost lyrical description of Bromley, which
is part paean, part mocking evocation of a typical suburban landscape, gardens, for
Silverstone, exist as just one component in a plethora of external ephemera. Garden
space is placed on a par with dilapidated window frames: 'Gleaming doorsteps,
decorated paths, polished cars, weeded gardens, the junk of ages, lopsided caravans,
peeling window frames, painted brickwork, double glazing, double garages…'
(1997, 7). Furthermore, none of the chapters in Visions of Suburbia are about
gardens. In like manner, Clapson documents opinion surveys conducted in the 1940s
by Mass Observation and local councils on the housing needs of the people. Often
semi-detached properties were most popular, in part Clapson concedes, because of
the value residents placed on having a garden (Clapson 2000, 156). Yet the role
played by gardens in providing living satisfaction for working-class people is merely
mentioned without any further exploration. Writing on suburbia is valuable because
it is intrigued by the aesthetics of ordinariness, but it has tended to refuse to explore
the garden as a significant site of study.
Indeed the only exception to date would seem to be Chevalier's (1998) study.
She is one of the few academic writers who has bothered to look at and empirically
examine ordinary gardens. Her work maps a typology of quotidian contemporary
British garden practices - a typology which, to my knowledge has not to date been
documented in academic writing. As a result, the reader has some idea of the content
and spatial organisation of suburban garden aesthetics.
However, there are also problems with Chevalier's work. Her suburban garden
template smacks of the well-worn English intellectual view of suburban living
- that it amounts to little more than standardisation. Moreover, the argument that
the suburban inhabitant can do no more to their garden than replicate their lounge,
theorises the suburbanite at best as unable to break the structural mould. Moreover,
Chevalier's analysis of her respondents floats free of class, gender, ethnicity,
sexuality or age. In what ways, one wonders, are tastes and choices inflected by
age or class? Chevalier's work makes an important contribution because her work
focuses gardens in the context of an ordinary place, but her work does not address
both the locations and the attendant aesthetics of class and gender.
Extraordinary places: from the transitory to the cemetery garden
The previous section looked to writing on suburbia as a means to spatially locate
classed and gendered ordinary gardens. Here I turn to work that examines gardens
which belong to the homeless, the disenfranchised, those living in communal
dwelling places and the Second World War dead. How, I ask, are those gardens
manifest and where are they located?
Tired of garden histories which marginalise, 'the under-class and women' and
mindful that, 'gardens other than those of the wealthy have rarely left a trace' writer