ABSTRACT
Picture the scene. It is 1992 and I’ve just become a first-time homeowner with my partner somewhere in Cheshire. The house was built in 1904 and there is work to be done. It has a long back garden and a medium sized front, but the truth is that we don’t really know what to do with it. At the same time, because we teach media studies in higher education we watch quite a lot of terrestrial television, where the garden is enjoying some popularity, and I’m partial to the lifestyle section of the weekend broadsheet press. We settle in, the garden slides over to me on the ledger of domestic responsibilities and then as I start to think about ‘what to put in’, the whole idea of the garden as media representation, as space and as a cultural practise starts to make me think.
