Civilising Grass

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Jonathan Cane. Civilising Grass

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CIVILISING GRASS

— Ivan Vladislavić, Flashback Hotel: Early Stories

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bodies massacred in room after room.6

The vitreousness of Nicol’s lawns is in stark contrast to the discursive softness of the lawns in the literary and technical archive. Apart from the brittle lawns in ‘Returning’ and Lungiswa Gqunta’s glassy installation Lawn 1 (see Plate 16), which I discuss in Chapter 4, the lawn is overwhelmingly and consistently described as ‘soft’, an ‘illustration of the beautiful’ (Jackson Downing 1853: 62; see also Johnson 1979: 154; Martin 1983: 467; Omole 2011; Stapf 1921: 88). The beauty, tranquillity and naturalness of the lawn are ideas that arrived in South Africa as part of the baggage of British empire. Even kikuyu, the lawn grass that has become naturalised in South Africa, was originally from the East Africa Protectorate and sent via Pretoria to Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London to be classified and propagated.

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