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? This book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities. 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 - is a classed and gendered practice manifested in specific types of visual aesthetics. This timely and original book develops a new area within cultural studies while contributing to debates about lifestyle and lifestyle media, consumption, class and methodology. A must read for anybody concerned with or intrigued by the cultural construction of identification practices.

Lisa Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. She has published widely in the field and is the co-author of the international best-selling textbook 'Media Studies: Texts, Institutions and Audiences' (with Andrew Willis, 1999).

Contents: Introduction: towards an ethnography of ordinary gardening; Histories and context; Gardening taste: theoretical concepts and framework; Garden legislators: gardening, ordinariness and history; Garden interpreters: garden lifestyle television and media culture; Class, taste and gardening; Gender and gardening; Questions of consumption: what ordinary gardeners do with garden 'lifestyle' media; Using sentimental capital: class, emotion and value; Bibliography; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.