As yesterday was the preview of the Chelsea Flower Show, a lot of
representations of the glories of gardening have been floating around.
A couple of points....
I find it interesting how the representations of gardening resemble the
representations of the English countryside i am encountering in my
research. Notions of national identity, health, asthetic pinnacles and
an all-too-human construction of natural-ness abound in each. And, just
as the rhetoric of the Countryside March was chock-a-block with
conflicting meanings, so it seems, is gardening. In one's
garden one can reproduce the `beauties' of the English countryside,
itself an un-natural product of centuries of human activity and
ideology. So, is the garden at one level a representation of a
representation? A simualcra, a sign so divorced from it's original
physical underpinnings that it becomes, as Rob Shield's terms it, a
`place-myth'?
And, as the transactions of capital obscure the
production of the commodities we consume, so gardens seem to be more and
more about aesthetics and less and less about producing food. As
William Cronon said, "Like most who prefer the country to the city, I
live in the city, and am entirely dependent on the intricate systems
with which it sustains my life. What now most strikes me about my urban
home is how easily it obscures from me the very systems that enable me
to survive" (Nature's Metroplis, 1991, p 384). The aetheticisation of
gardening is, of course, part of the process of its commoditisation --
and the growth of yet another big source of wealth.
To underpin this, ITV news reported last night that Britons spend about
2.5 billion pounds on gardening -- according to them, third in place
after decorating and cooking as the British obsession. So there are
fairly obvious financial influences at work here, fostering our
appreciation of gardening. Many of the submissions have talked about
how we, as individuals, love the act of gardening -- how it is
personally recuperative activity, good therapy and all that. And so
once again, the personal is intimately intertwined with the economic and
the political and perhaps one of the loci of this is the Garden Centre.
As my dad used to say "Nothing that the application of wheelbarrow-loads
of money wont fix."
Finally, i want to say that coming from Vancouver Island, my
understandings of gardening (producing food, fighting back against the
ever-encroaching forest, flowers as a luxury, DIY and vernacular
landcapes) are quite different than those of my English friends.
Gardening in `wilderness' areas is quite different than gardening on an
island which has been clear-cut for hundreds of years even when the
former is trying to emulate the latter.
I am enjoying the debate very much. This is one of the reasons i
joined the forum in the first place.
regards
rhys evans
School For Policy Studies,
U. of Bristol
UK
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