ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 looked at the legislators of garden history. It argued that most dominant accounts, save for the new emerging social history of the private domestic garden, fail to provide any contextual history or location for understanding ordinary peoples’ gardening practices and aesthetics at the local level. However, while written sources are bestowed high measures of symbolic worth in our culture, they are not the only texts which communicate values about the garden. This chapter turns its attention to a more popular and contemporary institutional site where gardens became the subject of intense focus in late 1990s: the media. It discusses how contemporary gardens, gardeners and gardening ‘experts’ were represented in the national and local press, magazine publishing and most especially on television.
