Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 74

the 'neat and in cultivated condition' stipulations of the Tenants' Handbook (Ravetz
and Turkington 1995, 181).
By contrast, the twentieth century is characterised by increased popularity in
gardening for the upper working and lower middle-classes. Constantine charts the
move to eight hours for manual labourers, British Summer Time (1916) and the
decrease in urban poverty as factors which made gardening more possible for a
greater number of people (see Chapter 2). Undoubtedly however, the most important
factors were growth in housing during the inter-war period - almost 4 million new
houses were built in Britain between 1919 and 1939 - and the large increase in
home-centred forms of leisure. Constantine traces popular enthusiasm for gardening
mirrored by burgeoning gardening journalism, books, guides and encyclopaedia.
And public investigators from the period emphasise a shift from public activities like
the pub to interests in DIY and gardening at home. Indeed, Constantine's conclusion
is that the nineteenth century reformers' wish to locate the working-class in to the
home was successfully realised.
For Ravetz and Turkington (1995) most garden developments were focused on
the back garden during the twentieth century. Using council estate records the authors
argue that most gardens on such estates were well kept. Note the following excerpt
from Rowntree (1941) who reported that in York, summer 1936 council estate gardens
were: 'ablaze with colour.' The authors note that the typical working-class council
estate garden had to be a utility space with some room for aesthetics: 'in practice,
people used their gardens to grow vegetables and flowers, for drying washing,
keeping chickens, rabbits and dogs, children's play, relaxation and 'nothing'' (1995,
189). Sketching the development of what they call the lower middle-class 'modern
garden', they argue that it increasingly became an 'open-air room', acting often to
compensate for the lack of space within the home. And charting new developments,
such as the introduction of concrete, the authors discuss the move to the patio garden
and the influence of the garden centre.
The richest on-going work on the ordinary contemporary home garden coming
out of the socio-historical tradition to date is by Mark Bhatti. He adopts empirical
analysis using qualitative data from the Mass Observation Project (2006), at times
blending MO data with his own supplementary survey material as a means of analysing
what gardens mean to people (Bhatti and Church 2001; Bhatti 2000). Gardening,
for Bhatti, carries such personal investment as an identity marker, that to label it a
hobby is to seriously under-state its significance (Bhatti 1999, 184). Identifying the
social, cultural and economic investments in gardening as a popular pursuit using
quantitative statistics from MINTEL, Bhatti situates his data within the context of
a number of contemporary trends: high levels of home and garden ownership (20.2
million private gardens in the UK in 1999); increased numbers in adult participation
in gardening; the 'presence of conglomeration capital in the garden industry' in the
form of the garden centre and the impact of gardening programmes on television in
the UK (Bhatti and Church 2001, 372). In these ways, he builds a view of the garden
as an increasingly important feature of contemporary living.
A distinctive feature of Bhatti's work is his insistence on conceptualising the
garden as a central element in any conception of the home and home-making.
Following a phenomenological route, he traces the relationship between the garden