Gardening

There have been many studies of gardens, but few have drawn on theories of consumer culture. Garden research has traditionally involved the archival examination of larger parks and gardens according to the various stylistic movements associated with them through time (e.g., Symes 2006). Here, historical accuracy has generally been prized over conceptual insight, and concepts of consumer culture have accordingly remained largely outside the frame. Recent work has come closer to the experience of modern domestic gardens by examining the various ways in which people enjoy being in them (e.g., Bhatti 2006). Here, an interest in cultures of pleasurable plant experience has shown how they provide an escape from wider pressures in a way that also necessarily downplays how gardens can also serve as expressions of consumer taste. Yet domestic gardens actually provide an interesting case regarding the extent to which certain notions of consumer culture are imposed upon the items housed within them, and broader theories of consumption can benefit from a trip into the garden. This entry substantiates this claim with particular reference to the contemporary United Kingdom, where there are still many domestic gardens and where the popular imagination still commonly portrays the inhabitants as a nation of keen gardeners.

Some of the worries associated with the rise of certain consumer cultures relate to the ways in which they encourage people to buy more than they otherwise need and more than is sustainable for them to acquire. The underlying premise here, as described by Martyn Lee, is that processes of marketing and fashion have largely been successful in encouraging societies to covet changing arrays of goods where the implication is that consumers will then soon discard them in favor of more culturally attractive equivalents. This framework of thinking inadvertently helps sustain an idea of the good itself as relatively inert. Because cultural obsolescence was understood as taking place long before any physical equivalent, the agency of the purchased item in terms of what it might practically do was often left out in the conceptual cold. The assumption was the attribute of social desirability alighted only momentarily on items whose physicality was relatively unimportant. The aim was to understand how this desirability was manufactured in the media rather than to explore [Page 627]how publics handled the capabilities of the goods they bought after the moment of purchase.

Within gardens, it instinctively feels difficult to make this assumption, and this is why gardens are instructive here. This is because the biological propensities of the plants often found in them mean that owners must often wait for the aesthetic attributes they desire and tend to their plants to ensure they arrive. As such, one of the most interesting challenges that gardens present to the expansion of consumer cultures relates to the relatively obvious fact that gardens often contain living things. The question that naturally follows is about the extent to which consumer cultures encouraging people to buy fashionable goods with little thought of how they must interact with them afterward have penetrated this environment. How easily are the things found in gardens transformed into the docile medium for the immediate forms of cultural communication through observed ownership often associated with the rise of consumer societies?

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