Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 76

class in to the home, Olechnowicz argues that the garden stood in for the decline
of the pub during those years. Yet Bhatti's research complicates the idea of staunch
gender boundaries in the contemporary garden. Insisting that the garden and home
are inseparable and acknowledging the tradition of research which uncovers the
differences in how men and women conceptualise home, he concedes that the garden
is a highly gendered space, though his emphasis on the social making of gender
usefully avoids the idea of biologistic gendered aesthetics. However, his empirical
data also shows that gender roles are constantly being 're-negotiated'; the garden
is a site of local bargaining about project decision-making and how labour is to be
divided.
Social history, with its emphasis on mapping both the social trends and the
mores of people in everyday life, offers a structured account 'from below' of the
private domestic garden of the past, which in turn provides a contextual backdrop
for understanding contemporary practice. Unravelling the narrative of the historical
formation of the 'enclosed cultivated ground' attached to homes in the nineteenth
and twentieth century, it charts the differential access to resources for middle and
working-class people, thereby providing an understanding of the historical legacy of
the classed garden of the contemporary. Such accounts provide a sense of the aesthetic
development of classed gardening - from the embrace of Robinson's 'natural'
herbaceous border in the middle-class garden to the prized chrysanthemums of the
working-class garden - as classifiable categories. Moreover, such accounts show a
clear historiography of the garden's moral dimensions: as a cleansing recreation for
maintaining the balanced disposition of the middle-class mind and body; and as a
corrective form of leisure to both ameliorate the atavistic tendencies of the working-
class and to diffuse their potential political radicalism by locating them at home. In
this sense the front garden especially, has literally been inscribed with virtue by the
nature of its upkeep, acting as a moral index of the worth of the people inside.
Garden Practices and Symbolic Work
This section turns to work that recognises the cultural consumption of gardens as
a means of communication. Garden practices and garden aesthetics are forms of
expression which render visible the categories within a culture: they act as symbolic
identity markers. For example, Wolschke-Bulmahn and Groening (1992) show the
'nature garden' was used in the early 1900s in Germany as a national symbol of
fascist political ideologies; and Helphand (1997) brings together world examples of
'defiant gardens' which act as symbolic sites of assertion and resistance.
Douglas and Isherwood (1996) argue that, 'all material possessions carry social
meanings and…(we must therefore)…concentrate a main part of cultural analysis
upon their use as communicators' (Douglas and Isherwood 1996, 59). Used as a
symbolic means to communicate with others, 'goods' they argue, 'are part of a live
information system' (1996, xiv). Douglas and Isherwood argue that consumption is
never related to purely economic factors; rather, it is a cultural as well as an economic
practice. Consumer goods must be analysed within the specific cultural context in
which they are acquired, used and exchanged. Their thesis is that people invest