A Taste for Gardening

Is the garden a consumption site where identities are constructed? Do gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned by class and gender? The number one hobby in the UK, this book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities.Offering a history of gardening as a classed leisure pursuit from the nineteenth century to the present day, combined with an examination of the popularity of garden 'lifestyle' from the garden centre to Ground Force, "A Taste for Gardening" investigates the wider regimes which play their part in the construction of classed and gendered identities. Recognition of the increased role of ordinary people in the media informs an analysis of the question of whether such an increase marks a concomitant embrace of previously marginalised representations of class and gender.With an examination of aesthetic dispositions as a symbolic mode of communication closely aligned to peoples' identities and drawing on ethnographic data gathered from encounters with gardeners, this book maps a typology of gardening taste, revealing that gardening - how plants are chosen, planted and cared for - are classed and gendered practices manifested in specific types of visual aesthetics. Moreover, the book reveals that men and women perform different kinds of gendered gardening tasks.This timely and original book develops a new area within cultural studies while contributing to debates about lifestyle, consumption, lifestyle media, class and methodology.