{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":127,"pdf_page":128,"physical_index":128,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"45f3d0ae36c93383da4afa00c0a9198454860f0125e24b54e25657448cc2a6b2"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"While these formulations certainly ring true in the starkest examples of agrarian and industrial labour and leisure, the case of horticultural work appears to bridge this divide. The hybrid nature of the business of supplying horticultural specimens and the varied ways in which consumers fit horticultural practice into their lives show a variety of approaches to time and the rhythms of tasks that, at least for the consumers, might be coded variously as work or leisure. For some consumers, horticulture might constitute their livelihood and they might approach their time in the garden as the main activity to fit other endeavours around; for others, gardening might be a hobby, something taken up as time allowed, whether regularly, for an hour a day, or really as a filler activity when space is freed up. Today, estate agents promote the ideal of the ‘low-maintenance garden’, to appeal to those who do not have much time to devote to tending plants; there has always been a broad spectrum in the ways in which horticultural consumers use their purchases.\n\nIn presenting itself as resident in the borderland between agriculture and industry, the seed trade recognized that its market was a hybrid as well. Consumers of seeds might plant grain, produce or flowers, for sustenance, economic livelihood, ornament or any combination thereof. Going as far back in the trade as Bernard M’Mahon, he cast a very broad net when it came to defining who the ‘American Gardener’ was in 1806. According to its extended title, the Calendar was ‘a complete account of all the work necessary to be done in the Kitchen-Garden, Fruit-Garden, Orchard, Vineyard, Nursery, Pleasure-Ground, Flower-Garden, Green-House, Hot-House, and Forcing Frames’ (M’Mahon 1806: iv). While the start of a demographic shift from rural to urban populations certainly did begin in the United States during the nineteenth century, that shift did not imply a decline in planting, but, rather, I think, a greater variety of markets. The variation in consumer profiles in the seed trade was reflected in the breadth of the commodities and in the varied approaches to horticultural pursuits.\n\nRegardless of how horticultural tasks were carried out, they were linked to ideals of improvement, on a number of different scales – improvement of the soil, of the home plot and by extension of region or even nation. Regardless of the time they had to spend on horticultural practices, and the ways in which they organized that time, if gardeners sought to improve small parcels of land, their collective efforts would create a national landscape. Horticultural commodities seemed to have as much in common with mercantile goods as with agricultural produce, as both tastes and access to garden materials might be influenced by broad commercial contact. Horticulture, in all its many facets, provided a possible bridge between the Jeffersonian vision of a small-scale agricultural endeavour and the American System’s support of larger scale commercial prospects. If Americans could see gardening as not only an artistic and scientific pursuit, but also an economic or commercial one, then improvement in the horticultural sense mirrored, rather than opposed, the cause of other ‘internal improvements’ that affected the composition of landscape on a national scale. Ultimately, improvement was another form of recording time, inscribing onto the landscape the changes between the ‘dim, infertile past’ and the abundance that was more readily possible as a result of horticultural commerce.\n\nCalendars and Clocks\n\n127","previous_page":126,"next_page":128}