Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 71

such as Balmori and Morton. Leftist writers, in a bid to chart the benefits of social
activism, have focused solely on collectively constructed public places such as urban
community projects. Rebecca Severson's contribution to The Garden as Idea, Place
and Action (1990), for example, is typical of this kind of writing. 'United We Sprout:
A Chicago Community Garden Story' (1990) describes the collective revamping of a
derelict land site in a Hispanic neighbourhood in West Town, Chicago. The narrative
trajectory of the piece takes the reader through the collective process of building the
garden: from initial meetings to organise rubbish clearance and develop a site plan,
to the democratic naming of the site and the organisation of a celebratory festival to
which residents and local politicians were invited. The garden was possible remarks
Severson, 'when residents of a decaying urban neighborhood combined the power of
organisation with the power of nature' (Severson 1990, 80). For leftist critics, writing
about gardening is worthy if it amounts to collective sites of resistance. And while
documenting this kind of project is politically valuable, one cannot help but wonder
if leftist writers are guilty of harbouring genuine fears of finding political stagnancy
and revolutionary inertia in the mundanity of the private, domestic garden.
Indeed there is far more existing literature on unusual and extraordinary garden
sites than there are about the ordinary and the mundane. Mandy Morris's (1997) work,
with its focus on the symbolic meaning of homeland and Englishness in British First
World war cemeteries further illustrates my point. Morris charts the transformation
of the 'signless spaces of “No Man's Land”' which were to become, 'visual frames
of reference for the war, as enclosures of national identity and grief …to become
powerfully symbolic spaces of Britain and empire' (1997, 411). Morris's cemetery
gardens are fashioned out of moving oppositions where the horrors of war are covered
over by greensward, but where the numbers of headstones serve to demonstrate the
violence of war: 'Serene surfaces of lawn and flowerbed stood as uneasy interfaces
between a sanitized landscape of national grief and the shattered bodies beneath,
between the official and unofficial, the private and the public' (ibid.). Morris's work
is about an exceptional interface, about gardens constructed in order to represent
grief, trauma and loss. But as Felski argues, 'everyday life is typically distinguished
from the exceptional moment: the battle, the catastrophe, the extraordinary deed'
(Felski 2000, 17).
These instances of writing, which temper the focus on the elite and aristocracy
in dominant liberal humanist histories, at least serve to academically legitimise
the gardens of the marginalised and the déclassé . And given the poverty and
disenfranchisement of the people these studies examine, one would expect the
analysis of their gardens to be focused on the über -ordinary. Yet rather, these texts
are reminiscent of the approach to class adopted by work on subcultures in cultural
studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979), which are attacked by Walkerdine
(1997) for refusing an analysis of the ordinariness of working-class culture in the
rush to exoticise or identify sites of political resistance. Similarly, the texts under
discussion here, which push the extra-ordinariness of the garden as event or site, act
to offer an apology for the ordinariness, the everyday and the mundane. And so once
again, the potential and intrigue of the ordinary is eluded, by-passed and ultimately
denigrated in these writings.