ABSTRACT
The photograph (see Figure 2.1) shows a back garden on a council estate in West Yorkshire in the mid-1950s. If you look closely, in the borders there are carnations and some orange hybrid tea roses, the kind bred and aggressively marketed for working-class consumers in the 1950s (Harkness 1978). A mop-head hydrangea resides in the far corner. The parameters, set in place by the council estate planners – concrete posts and green chicken wire – act as an early fencing system until the ubiquitous privet hedge was to grow up to the desired height. But the central feature of this garden is the rectangle of nemesias in the centre of the lawn. Drawing on a design reminiscent of municipal park planting schemes, the idea of a central bed in the middle of the lawn is a typically working-class aesthetic trope. The lawn acts as a frame for the summer pride of the working-class garden: the bedding plants that create a riot of colour at its centre. Subsequent summers would see the same bed full of roses and edged by bedding plants – precisely the planting scheme that the contemporary garden journalist Christopher Lloyd 1 (1984) warns the would-be gardener against. Yet the garden in the photograph, the garden where I spent my early childhood with my mother and grandparents, was admired and valued by local people in the community. Indeed my mother told me that a neighbour ‘couldn’t resist’ taking the slide because, ‘he thought the garden looked so colourful’.
