Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 82

profitable relationship between the lifestyle media, the display of gardening lifestyle
ideas and consumer culture of the time. What follows then are analyses of television
and media culture that accompany the ethnographies of classed and gendered
gardening in chapters 6 and 7. They chart the specific moment of how the garden
figured in television and media culture and its subsequent relationship with how
gardeners used mediated ideas as part of their own gardening identities in mid to late
1990s Britain.
Lifestyle television was both eminent and popular, hence its prominence in
primetime scheduling in the mid to late 1990s. However, since then garden lifestyle
programmes, as well as lifestyle media products such as gardening magazines, grew
in particular. I explain this growth within the context of increased consumer spending
during the period on garden merchandise and the continued popularity of the garden
centre as a key British leisure site.
This chapter then divides in to two sections: the first 'Gardening People' examines
how British television used strategies of 'ordinari-ization' (Brunsdon et al. 2001: 53)
as a means of urging people to incorporate lifestyle practices into their daily lives.
The ways in which lifestyle knowledges were presented underwent changes in the
early 1970s: the authoritative tone of public service was replaced with what Ellis has
called 'popular public service' (Ellis 2000, 32). Increasingly, viewers witnessed the
embrace of 'ordinary' people in garden lifestyle programming and garden 'experts'
became personality-interpreters (Bauman 1987), packaging lifestyle ideas from
the symbolic repertoires on offer in consumer culture (Chaney 2001). I discuss
how these 'ordinari-ization' strategies worked to construct a discourse of lifestyle
achievability and accessibility for viewers in programmes such as Homefront in the
Garden (BBC2, 1997-) and Real Gardens (Channel Four, 1998-). 1
The second section 'Gardens', examines how the media both interpreted and
showcased visual ideas about the British garden as a lifestyle space. Arguing that
one needed recourse to post-modern aesthetics (Featherstone 1991; Jameson 1991)
to understand the visual codes in circulation at that historical juncture, I discuss
the accessibility of national aesthetics advocated in programmes such as Gardening
Neighbours (BBC2, 1998-) and elements of the lifestyle press, for example Observer
Life. Using Marxist perspectives on history and postmodernism (McGuigan 1999),
I discuss how historical conceptions of the garden, given through the interpretative
advice of garden experts, acted as a capital resource for some viewers. Lastly, arguing
that especially in relation to the makeover genre, the garden 'reveal' acted to present
an extension of the self, I explore whether locations of class and gender inflect the
symbolic construction of the contemporary 'ordinary' garden.
In these ways, one can see that the media, a more popular and accessible enclave
than academe or the literary bookshelf, was a site where ordinariness was included in
a bid to extend audiences. One of the questions that struck me at the time was: might
media representations provide a potential challenge to garden legislators discussed
1 Homefront in the Garden is a typical example of a popular British lifestyle makeover
programme. Real Gardens has a magazine programme format and was screened at 9.30pm on
Channel Four on Sunday nights.