Agriculture Reference
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sanctuary behind high fences away from the public gaze was seen as a space where
moral family ideals could be fostered and held dear using gardening as a rational
recreation (Constantine 1981, 390). So that while typically jobbing gardeners were
employed in the suburban garden, the middle-class did much of the work themselves
as a means of ameliorating any sense that leisure time could be tarnished by idleness.
Gardening was a morally cleansing attribute for both mind and body.
Indeed moral imperatives under-girded bids in the nineteenth century to
encourage gardening among rural and urban working-class people. Class analysis
is central to Constantine's history of popular gardening. He argues that public forms
of popular leisure such as wakes, violent sports and music halls, seasoned as they
were, according to leisure historians (Bailey 1978) by drinking and gambling,
reportedly 'dismayed the middle-class observer' (Constantine 1981, 390). Such
dismay was underpinned during periods of industrial unrest by growing middle-
class anxiety about the working-class as a potential revolutionary force. In this
way, gardening was conceived as a respectable form of leisure which could steer
the poor away from degrading group activities to useful home-centred recreation
and political compliance. These sentiments had a real impact on new imperatives to
encourage gardening, such as the moves by landowners to attach gardens to cottages
in model villages, such as the Earl of Winchester and Earl Grey, followed later in
the century by industrial philanthropists, for example Cadbury at Bournville in the
1850s (Constantine 1981, 392). Yet while such changes were intended to augment
healthier, more serviceable and respectable employees, very few working-class
people actually benefited from such schemes. Leisure time was scarce, pollution
was not conducive to gardening, but most especially housing provision determined
garden access - so very few working-class people had one. The garden was more
common in rural and farming villages and the historical antecedents of working-
class specialist expertise in plants in specific regions (for example gooseberries in
Manchester) began in areas which had undergone the first phase of industrialisation
(Hoyles 1991) and the use of allotments to support the income of households in
rural cottage gardens was also common (Ravetz and Turkington 1995). But largely,
the issue for working-class gardening was about the lack of access to the garden
as a resource: many urban dwellers were simply denied a garden. And in Britain
during the nineteenth century the population was becoming increasingly urban: in
1851 54 per cent of the population occupied towns, by 1911 that figure had risen
to 79 per cent. Moreover, what constituted a garden was often little more than a
window box or tubs over a concreted small rear yard (Constantine 1981, 393).
Ravetz and Turkington (1995) name the working-class style that contributed to the
development of the twentieth century garden the 'vernacular tradition'. But while
attachments to flowers and specialist flower tending by the artisan - for example,
growing chrysanthemums for prizes and pet-keeping characterises the working-class
vernacular it would seem from most of the sources, that the lack of back garden for
working-class households somewhat prevented a particular working-class planting
aesthetic from developing during this period. Interestingly, by the turn of the century
the front garden had more ubiquity than the back though by the inter-war period it
was subject to class differentials: private sector front gardens were controlled by
social pressure while working-class front gardens on council estates were subject to
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