Peaceful, pleasant and private: the British domestic garden as an ordinary landscape
Abstract
This paper uses narrative accounts of private gardens in Britain from the Mass-Observation Archive (MO) to explore ideas of landscape, privacy and attachment that emerge from daily practices and routines in these ordinary domestic spaces. We argue for the domestic garden as a vernacular or ordinary landscape that displays tensions between the private and the public nature of home within ambivalent emotional responses. Extended personal narratives offer privileged access to a site of intense engagement and carefully guarded privacy, yet with varying levels of attachment. The garden is a space well described in Britain in its public form but less well known as a private, everyday landscape. In this way a cultural landscape study becomes a contemporary critical geography of an ordinary space.Citation
Bhatti M, Church A, Claremont A (2014) 'Peaceful, pleasant and private: the British domestic garden as an ordinary landscape', Landscape Research, 39 (1), pp.40-52.Publisher
RoutledgeJournal
Landscape ResearchAdditional Links
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01426397.2012.759918Type
ArticleLanguage
enISSN
0142-6397EISSN
1469-9710ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1080/01426397.2012.759918