ABSTRACT
In this final chapter, I want to encapsulate the book’s historical findings on classed and gendered taste cultures in the ordinary garden and its relationship to lifestyle media culture, recording as I do my concluding remarks about a particular moment in British media and cultural history in the late 1990s. I also want to end the book by tentatively sketching out an attempt to theorise how the working-class people of the study use and make their own forms of value through gardening. In doing so, I revisit Bourdieu by extending his concept of capital as a means of exploring the emotional resources, produced out of affective familial ties, which become fastened to the skills, knowledge and assets that are drawn upon to make gardens. Arguing that such a resource is held, circulated, exchanged and traded in local contexts I draw on both Nowotny (1981) and Reay’s (2000) concept of ‘emotional capital’ to argue that the valuing located in this small-scale study might act as a form of ‘sentimental capital.’ I chart how gardening with sentimental attachments became manifest in the empirical data: through what gardening means, familial passed down practices and in relation to sentimental feelings provoked by condemnation of lifestyle garden television. For it was here, where opposing aesthetic value systems (national vs. local and lifestyle vs. ways of life) met, that I got a clear sense of how the working-class gardeners in particular, had developed a way of conceptualising their hobby using emotional resources of self-valuing. In this final chapter I argue that these affective resources are expressive of a local alternative value system that insists on reproducing community valued aesthetics in an emotional politics of resistance to lifestyle culture, aesthetics and consumerism.
