Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 75

and the outside world as part of the construction of psycho-social life-worlds within
the practices and routines of everyday life. In these ways, Bhatti's work brings a
multi-layered perspective to his analysis of what gardens mean and how they work as
embedded forms of cultural practice against a backcloth of wider cultural processes.
Subtle thinking and attention to detailed nuance in relation to the garden informs his
oeuvre on gardening in a risk society (1999); the environment and gardens as brokers
of human-nature relations (Bhatti and Church 2001); gardening in relation to gender
(2000) and the aging process (2006). Countering Beck (1992) in his early work on
gardening in an age of risk, he argues that peoples' awareness of environmental risk
acts to accelerate, 'the search for local meaning and ontological security in everyday
objects' (1999, 183-4). He therefore identifies gardening as a way in which anxieties
about modernity can be assuaged by returning to the everyday rhythms of making
home and garden. His work on leisure, the home and human-nature relations in the
garden uses data to uncover highly personalised 'practices, routines and memories'
in relation to nature (2006, 275). This came through peoples' responses to their
awareness of the consequences of using pest controls; their enjoyment of engaging
their senses in the garden; their memories of experiences involving nature in the
garden with friends and family members - often uncovering how plants and objects
within the garden become imbued with emotional meanings. Bhatti argues that
while the garden industry and media representations showcase instant consumerist
gratification, his data reveals 'more traditional sociations' in which people still enlist
their agency in to develop 'complex, sensual and personalised readings of nature'
with a view to potentially re-ignite re-enchantment with nature (2006: 380). In more
recent work on gardening and the ageing process he unearths the garden as a space
which offers a sense of home, a site of independence and identity, a status symbol
to be 'maintained' and a space through which the aging process is resisted (2006).
Indeed, if as Hoyles argues there is a 'kaleidoscope of cultural meanings attached
to gardening' (1991, 8) then Bhatti's detailed empirical analyses show its various
infractions. Gardens are spaces where people can: till the earth; find sanctuary;
connect with family history; express identities of social standing and taste; generate
symbols of moral authority and respectability; utilise space as a source of conflict
with neighbours; find a way to sensuously connect with nature and re-negotiate
gender relations.
While Bhatti (1999) concedes that the garden is a highly gendered space, his
work makes a departure from previous social historians who argue that gardens
have historically been spaces with highly demarcated roles for men and women.
Davidoff and Hall (1983), for example, argue that women in the mid nineteenth
century became responsible for the decorative function of flowers. In Wilson's
(1991) account of the North American postwar suburban garden, he argues that the
shift to service industries meant that lower middle-class men used gardening as a
form of remasculisation. Men presided over barbecues and mowed lawns, while
women tended flowers and tilled the earth with trowels (1991, 91). In similar vein,
Olechnowicz (1997) argues that it was working-class men who governed gardens
on council estates during the inter-war period in Britain: gardening was men's work
and parts of the garden belonged to them. Drawing on MO data and giving weight
to Constantine's (1981) argument that amateur gardening located the working-