Production of Scottish Open Gardens: privacy and power

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on Scottish Open Gardens (OG) run by a charitable organisation. OGs are those attached to private houses that are opened as visitor attractions, where a proportion of the money charged for entry is raised for charity. Whilst there have been a few studies on OGs, they have omitted to develop conceptual debates relevant to OGs. This paper identifies privacy and power as key themes determining the ways in which OGs are produced by three kinds of ‘co-producers’: garden owners, volunteer organisers and helpers. Drawn from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Scottish Lowlands, I will explain how the deconstruction of the private-public boundary in OGs underlies the nuanced power relationships. I argue that legitimacy of power exercised by the co-producers is determined by their perceptions of what is morally justifiable and by the geographical remits of locations where power is exercised. The paper concludes by emphasising implications for practice and suggestions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Open Gardens
• privacy
• power
• perception
• legitimacy

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to garden owners and their associates for participating in this research. I am also grateful to Professor Robbie Nicol and Professor Simon Beames, who patiently supervised my doctoral research. I also appreciate the help of Elizabeth Leith, who has proofread this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This classification is that of the SGS guidebook.

2. I considered the data comparability because of my scepticism about the concept of theoretical or data saturation, an imaginary point where nothing new can be found. It is uncertain how many times a theme needs to re-emerge to be identified as data replication or redundancy.

3. There were no detailed selection criteria for defining ‘good’ gardens. An internal document called the Guidelines for District Organisers simply mentions ‘The garden must have some horticultural interest’ and ‘The garden must be tidy’ (SGS, 2012, p. 3).

4. Volunteer organisers gained information on potential gardens through word-of-mouth recommendations and assumed that gardens introduced by their peers, such as other volunteer organisers in the same region, were up to standard.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sho Shimoyamada

Dr Sho Shimoyamada was a PhD candidate at The University of Edinburgh when this research was conducted and is currently a Project Assistant Professor at The University of Tokyo. His academic interests include sociology of leisure, geography of leisure, leisure education, educational technology and internationalisation of higher education.