Mark Bhatti

Home, the culture of nature and meanings of gardens in late modernity

The growth in the provision of gardens has been an important feature of housing in the UK during the 20th century, and yet the significance of the humble domestic garden has been neglected in studies of housing and home. This paper examines the role of the garden in the meaning of home, and draws on theoretical discussions of nature, environmental risk and social uncertainty in late modernity. Secondary empirical data is used to investigate the changing uses of gardens and practices of gardening. A survey of garden owners provides primary empirical data to examine meanings of gardens and personal experiences of nature. The paper concludes that the garden is an important site for privacy, sociability and sensual connections to nature, and these activities can be understood as negotiations and practices to address the social and environmental paradoxes of late modern life.

‘I never promised you a rose garden’: gender, leisure and home-making

This paper explores the importance of contemporary gardens as leisure sites and argues that leisure in general, and the garden in particular, play an important role in the process of homemaking. We also consider how the contemporary garden reflects wider social relations by examining how gender relations imbue gardens and gardening. The gendered meanings of gardens and the garden as a place where gender power relations are played out, are highly significant in the social construction of ‘home’. Using primary research data, the paper looks at what it is about the domestic garden that is important to both men and women, and how it contributes to homemaking. The findings show that there are conflicting uses and meanings of gardens which help to reveal the changing nature of gender relations in late modernity.

'When I'm in the garden I can create my own paradise': homes and gardens in later life.

This paper brings together recent work on later life and considers the effects of ageing in relation to participation and interest in gardening. Whilst there is considerable research and literature on issues such as health, housing, and social care, the significance of the garden in process of home-making is less well understood. Using qualitative data from the Mass Observation Data Archive, key physical, psycho-social processes that impact on the use of the garden and gardening activities are examined. It will be suggested that the garden can have major significance in the (re) creation of ‘home’ in later life.

‘I love being in the garden’: enchanting encounters in everyday life

This paper examines how the domestic garden is experienced as an intimate place in everyday life. With reference to Bachelard we seek to analyse prosaic pleasures and enchanting encounters that are revealed through multi-sensorial engagements and emotional attachments within the social/natural world. In particular we focus on three modalities of the everyday: work or tasks involved in gardening; that is, sensuous and embodied experiences explored through the notion of haptic perception; ‘cultivation’ in the sense of taking care of the garden, as well as caring for the self and others; and emotional attachments invoking body/place memories, especially of childhood gardens. To illustrate these themes we use garden narratives drawn from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA).

Women's leisure and auto/biography: empowerment and resistance in the garden.

This exploratory paper addresses prevailing conceptualisations of womens agency in leisure. It focuses on the reproduction/resistance framework characteristic of much feminist work. Realising the role of leisure in reproducing oppressive gender relations and the various ways that leisure can also resist them is vital to the continual politicisation of leisure, however we explore whether this framework can always adequately realise the complexities of womens lived relations to engendered power. We specifically focus on the conceptual relationship between empowerment and resistance. Using the illustration of one womans auto/biography lodged with the Mass Observation Archive, we question whether womens empowerment is derived from a contextual repositioning to gendered norms and an agency which neither resists nor straight-forwardly reproduces gender relations.

Whatever Happened to 'Housing and the Environment'?

This paper takes stock of the housing and environment debate and argues that much of the optimism of the early 1990s has declined. Our own work is reviewed as an example of the limits of previous approaches to analysing contemporary housing and environmental issues. There appears to be a paradox in that housing organisations are now much more environmentally aware; many are developing green housing projects, and yet the development of theory has lagged behind. It is argued that the analysis of environmental issues in housing studies needs to be strongly linked to wider debates and cross-cutting themes such as social and economic sustainability, social integration and fair competition in the context of globalisation.

Housing/Futures? The Challenge from Environmentalism

Housing studies have much to contribute to the debate about sustainable futures and yet there has been a lack of critical engagement with environmentalism. This paper sets out to show how the environmental debate can be enhanced by three traditional perspectives found within housing studies; these are: neo-classical economics, Weberian sociology and Marxism. It is suggested that housing researchers have begun to incorporate environmental issues into housing analysis, but we need to go further and engage in the environmental debate through the development of an eco-sensitive housing concept. The paper is a contribution towards an environmental understanding of the housing process.

Peaceful, Pleasant and Private: The British Domestic Garden as an Ordinary Landscape

Abstract This paper uses narrative accounts of private gardens in Britain from the Mass-Observation Archive (MO) to explore ideas of landscape, privacy and attachment that emerge from daily practices and routines in these ordinary domestic spaces. We argue for the domestic garden as a vernacular or ordinary landscape that displays tensions between the private and the public nature of home within ambivalent emotional responses. Extended personal narratives offer privileged access to a site of intense engagement and carefully guarded privacy, yet with varying levels of attachment. The garden is a space well described in Britain in its public form but less well known as a private, everyday landscape. In this way a cultural landscape study becomes a contemporary critical geography of an ordinary space.

Human-landscape relations and the occupation of space: experiencing and expressing domestic gardens

A consideration of occupation and space is outlined to advance nonrepresentational thinking about human—landscape relations. Empirical findings are presented from a research project based on data from the Mass Observation Archive relevant to gardens and gardening. These data are analysed to explore how ‘ordinary’ people (who have contributed to this Archive) express and experience issues concerning their home gardens. Our analysis suggests four distinct modes of occupation relevant to the ways in which these lay writers describe their garden and gardening experiences and activities. The naturalistic mode is occupied with the garden as expressive of ‘nature’; the nostalgic mode is occupied with memory and self-reflection; the pragmatic mode concerns tasks/activities that constitute the routine practices of gardening; and the mimetic mode is occupied with the interpersonal dynamics and processes of human social activity. The analysis is situated in the theoretical context of some recent developments in nonrepresentational theory. We suggest that our approach and data are compatible with the process-orientation of nonrepresentational thinkers, and that—contrary to certain objectivist tendencies within nonrepresentational theorising—this approach does not need to neglect the importance of issues of subjectivity and experience, and the relevance of textual data. We aim to lend empirical substance to recent theoretical and philosophical discussions on space, and speculations about why the home garden appears to be so important to many people.

Going public: landscaping everyday life

Gardens are not unusual sites to practise cultural geographies. In an earlier ‘cultural geographies in practice’ Steve Daniels reflected on his work on Art of the Garden, an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2004, which toured to other galleries,1 and a more recent contribution from Laura Lawson recounted public engagement with a community garden site in Chicago.2 This latest account documents a different, practice-based approach to the British garden, one that involved wide public engagement through a public seminar, a writing workshop and an exhibition of ‘lay’, i.e. amateur material, principally photographs. Both in its making and for its duration the exhibition caused us to explore the production and limits of lay and expert knowledge, not least because in many cases the photos on display did not conform in any way to the standards of composition and editing associated with public exhibition. Here we outline some further challenges we encountered when running the exhibition, highlighting the value of engaging with the public to deepen understanding of both everyday spaces and everyday academic practice.