Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 72

The historical accounts of the garden surveyed thus far offer only partial
fragments of knowledge for historicising and locating a recent study of the private
domestic garden as a classed and gendered site. In the following section I turn to
writing in social history - work which arguably provides a rich contextual backdrop
for the ethnographic details of classed and gendered gardening practices explored
later in this topic.
Locating a Social History of the Private Domestic Garden
Bhatti defines the home garden as 'an area of 'enclosed cultivated ground' within the
boundaries of the owned or rented house, where plants are grown and other materials
arranged spatially' (1999, 185). His definition conceives the garden as an ordinary
everyday space, attached to the home of either middle or working-class people. In
this section, I discuss a range of authors (Bhatti 1999, 2000, 2006; Bhatti and Church,
2001; Constantine 1981; Hall and Davidoff 1994; Hoyles 1991; Morris 1995; Ravetz
and Turkington 1995; Wilson 1991) whose work charts both the development of
the garden plot, as well as an understanding of what the aesthetics of the 'area of
enclosed cultivated ground' has meant to both middle and working-class people
since the 19 th century. The starting point for these writers is a shared agreement that
the private home garden has been neglected across the social sciences.
One way in which social historians have acted to challenge the silence on home
gardens has been to map its socio-historical development. Constantine (1981), for
example charts the moves made by the professional middle-class in the early 1800s
out of inner city London to the Northern and Midland suburbs into homes with
private gardens. He draws on early forms of gardening media, such as magazines,
on sources from an emerging gardening industry and from horticultural clubs, as a
means of charting middle-class enthusiasm for gardening, which became something
of a social necessity during the period. Ravetz and Turkington (1995) argue that
classed styles emerged at this time and that middle-class gardeners used the 'formal
Victorian suburban tradition'. Their account gives colour to the reader by sketching
out the aesthetic details of such gardens: roses, exotics and rockeries were popular
and lawned areas and distinctive trees were used as points of interest in these spaces.
And by the late 1800s the 'natural' school, valorised by William Robinson with the
idea of the herbaceous border of perennials was influential.
Central to the literature is the idea that the garden is a moral space. Gardens
were used during the early 1800s as pedagogical devices for children through which
caring practices were taught through cultivation (Davidoff and Hall 1994, 373).
Hoyles notes how Dickens thought gardening was a useful reform for prostitution
(1991, 16), and working-class urban and school gardens in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century were thought to make boys employable and girls into better
mothers (Morris 1995, 60). Practices of sowing, tending and reaping were made
synonymous with good moral forces as children were represented metaphorically
as gardens in fiction (Davidoff and Hall 1994, 373; and see also Morris 1995). And
the idea of privacy was important in the suburban garden, for unlike the aristocratic
gardens, which had been intended for the display of ostentation, middle-class