I like gardening, but I don’t have much of a green thumb. The way I think of it, sometimes the things I plant “take,” and sometimes they don’t. Gardens and gardening was never something that I gave much thought to as a topic of sociological analysis until a saw a presentation at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in 2006 that changed my mind.* I went to a session because Marjorie DeVault was presiding (and I LOVE her work). It was an interesting panel full of people at all different stages of their careers. One woman’s presentation dealt with front yard gardens and she convinced me the topic was worthwhile.
Gardens and gardening (particularly domestic gardens and gardening)—as you might imagine—are not topics of study that receive a great deal of attention. When gardens are mentioned in sociology, it’s often a variable included somewhere in a list of “chores” people do around the house. Quantitative studies of the division of household labor sometimes have oddly exhaustive lists of chores like this. But gardens are also a space. They are places we go to relax (sometimes even while we’re “working”). Like our homes, they are part of a performance of domestic identity that we labor to keep up. Gardens are also gendered spaces and gardening, a gendered activity. Bhatti and Church put it this way,
meanings of gardens are highly gendered, and… the garden is a place within which gender relations are often played out or re-negotiated… [I]t is necessary, as with studies of the home as a domestic sphere and consumption in the home, to view domestic gardens not simply as sites where man and women adopt different roles, but as places shaped by the continual restructuring of gender relations. (here)
Inequality by (Interior) Design 