My efforts to keep Britain Today actually about today have slipped a little again.  My excuse is a very good one: I have been moving house.  But as I am now happily ensconced in my new abode, it's back again to tracking the national trio of be-suited 40-somethings.  Happy days.

'Cept I'm ignoring them today, since, trawling through the 700-odd posts in my RSS reader brought me Much Funner Stuff. 

First up, Georgian London on pineapples.  Yes, pineapples.  Go.  Read.  Giggle. 

Also in history, Peter Marshall review's She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth.  Apparently we're not supposed to have heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Schama and Ferguson have been dispatched to the nation's rescue on this front, I'm sure. 

Coming in under both the 'history' and 'Tories' categories (hisTories?), there's a new biography of Harold Macmillan out.  (I actually know more about Eleanor of Aquitaine than I do Harold Macmillan.  Should I remedy this?)

And!  National nature writing treasure Richard Mabey has a new book out: Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature.  Guardian reviews by both Andrew Motion and Bella Bathurst make it fairly certain that I will be chuffed if this mysteriously arrives on my new doorstep. 

There's a new number of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography out this month and it's a special issue on 'seldom told tales from the field'.  These are of course our sociological cousins having a natter about the complications of ethnographic fieldwork: anthropologists like to keep it a mysterious rite of passage. 

There's a lot of grist in this issue for those who like their ethnography with added sex and violence, but as I have classier tastes I went straight for Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Cultivating Questions for a Sociology of Gardens.  It turns out that while our Durkheim-clutching friends across the hall can sort themselves out to frankly discuss ethnography, what they apparently can't do is cope with the idea that someone might want to study gardening.  Hondagneu-Sotelo, as a full professor (not just in the American sense) at USC, is far from the hapless research initiate that, say, a PhD student looking at tradition in Britain might be, so I don't think we've got an effect here of "oh, look at that ninny flailing about".  So, come on sociologists, dig for victory or geography will leave you in the dust! 

More seriously, Hondagneu-Sotelo does throw about some reasons for why this might be, principally that sociology's niche is typically conceptualised as studying power relations and modernity so gardening is considered 'frivolous and banal' (506) within this.  Fortunately she fights gardening's corner, mustering a lit review of broad scholarship which has already had me library-ordering in Kenneth Helphand's Defiant Gardens.  She also turns to her own research, and research conducted with Hernan Ramirez, to show that gardens are indeed deeply socially, politically, and economically embedded. 

Good stuff!