Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 78

tradition is the result of new money and the rise of the 'American suburban ideal'
- 'as new money permits more people to enjoy flexibility in exercising esthetic tastes
… a more modern ideal will be expressed in the manor garden' (Kimber 1973, 25).
Kimber's research was followed in 1975 by a startlingly similar study about
dooryard gardens in Brushy, Texas. Gene Wilhelm (1975), who had clearly read
Kimber's 1973 article, developed a six garden type classification system based on the
rural black community's gardening practices. Wilhelm concludes that factors such as
family life cycle, occupational demands and economic status were the factors which
influenced the type of dooryard garden the families he studied chose.
Christopher Grampp's short article Social Meanings of Residential Gardens
(1993) is about what gardening means to Berkeley and Albany residents in California
according to social class. 'For all the interest in the garden,' Grampp complains, 'one
area has been ignored: the broader social meanings of gardens' (Grampp 1993, 178).
Based on informal interviews, this journalistic piece develops a classification system
of three garden groups: the 'California living garden', the 'well-tempered garden'
and the 'expressionist garden'.
The 'California living garden' which Grampp argues, 'epitomizes the average
middle-class garden in the state', is seen as a domestic extension to the house
(Grampp 1990, 181). Paved surfaces and lawn give the garden an interior feel and the
garden is used for domestic activities like eating outdoors, entertaining or children's
play. This type of garden is constructed as an escape from city life; its emphasis is
therefore on providing a space for relaxation. Plants are naturalistic, decorative and
sensual and work to provide a private enclosure.
By contrast the working-class well-tempered garden is, 'formal, ordered, neat'.
For these gardeners rather than the garden being a private space, the garden is
conceived as 'aggressively public.' For the well-tempered gardeners, the garden is
not a place of relaxation, it requires constant and laborious surveillance: 'to me its
defining characteristic is that every inch has been attended to by the owner, forged
into an undeniably human creation' (Grampp 1990, 182). When Grampp conducted
his interviews, he found that his working-class respondents never spoke of the garden
as a leisure pursuit - the task of constant garden improvement made the garden a
place of work. And plant life in this garden type must bend to human will: trees and
shrubs are pruned into 'contrived shapes' and grass is constantly mown to keep it
in check. Garden ornaments and artefacts 'abound' and house fronts are painted in
brash colours. Alongside these features, well-tempered gardeners tend to fall in with
the local garden style, indeed they, 'often copy each other in great detail.' And, in
line with the idea that Grampp's working-class gardeners regard their gardens as
public spaces, flattery and compliments from passers-by are greatly valued.
These articles illustrate that as Douglas and Isherwood (1996) claim, gardens
are sites which are used as markers of social meaning: the people in these examples
use them to perform class identity and in this way, gardens are consumed in ways
which tell the passer-by about social station. Kimber (1973) and Wilhelm's (1975)
geographical work demonstrates that people across different historical moments and
cultural contexts make aesthetic choices in putting their gardens to symbolic work.
However, the problem with this type of work is that the onus is placed on the reader
to interpret their geographical findings for the purposes of cultural studies. While the