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ОглавлениеChapter 1
The Lawn Discourse
(n.) A grassy place in front of my house that you should stay the fuck off of.
— TenInchPlaya, urbandictionary.com
In Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa George Thompson describes his arrival at the residence of his friend Mr Thornhill in the Eastern Cape. He remarks that it is ‘one of the most beautiful spots in Albany, with lawns and copsewoods, laid out by the hand of Nature, that far surpass many a nobleman’s park in England’ (1827: 20). The image of the lawn provides Thompson with a familiar convention by which to order the landscape and bring it within a British frame. He is not content simply to note that the lawns and copsewoods are thoroughly English; he stresses that they would ‘surpass’ an English landscape garden.
Thompson’s comment provides insight into the logic of British imperial adjudication and ‘measurement’ and also reveals the way in which landscape is in the service of class. The naturalness of the lawn appears as a sign ‘of the aristocratic landowner’s improving hand’ (Bunn 1994: 152). Even in England where the lawn was thoroughly naturalised, commentators were well aware that vast amounts of labour and capital were involved in making and keeping lawns, although this was often downplayed or even purposefully hidden, as in the American example of Andrew Jackson Downing, who in the 1840s had his lawns mowed at night by ‘invisible hands’ so that family and guests would not have to witness this ‘distasteful activity’ (Jenkins 1994a).
It seems to me that this impulse is more pronounced in the colony and serves not only to keep out of the frame the ‘invisible hands’ but further to assert that the ‘hand of Nature’ is responsible. If the English landscape garden of this period strived for an affected naturalness that served as evidence of the naturalness of its owners, a landscape garden discovered in Africa that actually required no labour must surpass that of a nobleman’s.
This chapter defines the concept of the lawn as a transplanted concept that crosses the colonial threshold. The idea of the lawn, with all that is connected to it, is confronted by a different physical reality, a place where the lawn does not exist, or does not yet exist, or has yet to find its place in a new environment; thus it is often imagined, conceptually placed within or read into the landscape, as something that is yet to be made. The discourse (which includes the sense of an ideal lawn) is largely shaped already but now has to be integrated with a new environment. Thus the concept of lawn hovers between the ideal and the real.
A non-event
The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody miss it.
— Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979)
The challenge for a travel writer, who is a ‘verbal painter’, is that he or she ‘must render momentously significant what is, especially from a narrative point of view, practically a non-event’ (Pratt 2007: 198).
Captain William Cornwallis Harris was a British diplomat, adventurer, hunter, author and amateur painter whose book Wild Sports of South Africa: Being the Narrative of an Expedition from the Cape of Good Hope (1839) describes his adventures in the Transvaal. His precision made his records of African fauna useful in the imperial metropole and interesting as historical documents rather than literary creations. His florid landscape prose is a standard – that is to say, typical and unremarkable – representation of the lawn idea of this period.
In Wild Sports of South Africa Harris describes his escape from a fierce battle, then an evening’s journey and thereafter the morning lifting the ‘curtain’ on the landscape. By his account, the view was not the ‘dreary waste’ such as he had just been travelling through, but rather an ‘extensive park’. He describes the scene before him: ‘A lawn, level as a billiard-table, was everywhere spread with a soft carpet of luxuriant green grass, spangled with flowers, and shaded by spreading acacia’ (1839: 55). He populates the prelapsarian tableau with exotic animals and flowers that ‘yielded [an] aromatic and overpowering perfume’.
This passage exemplifies Mary Louise Pratt’s three standard elements of the imperial trope: ‘the mastery of the landscape, the estheticizing adjectives, the broad panorama anchored in the seer’ (2007: 205).
It is necessary to address Harris’s deployment of a number of standard lawn tropes – levelness (‘as a billiard-table’), softness (‘a carpet’), ‘luxuriant’ greenness1 – but I want to defer close analysis of these grammatical elements for now. It is enough to note at this point that his lawn possesses the attributes that would qualify it as a lawn and qualify it to be found as such. What I want to draw attention to is the strangeness of Harris’s discovery: the arrival at a lawn that does not (yet) exist. It is an entirely literary construction of a cultivated terrain requiring no labour, though implying labour; a prefiguring of the lawns that were to come and the real hands that would get dirty digging. This ‘lawn’, this level, soft, green, luxuriant, decorated carpet, is ‘only’ veld, a field in drag. This passage demonstrates a conceptual transformation and appropriation of the landscape through the eye. Harris is making a lawn where there is none. In terms of colonial discourse, the already present lawn is a form of welcoming; an acknowledgement, so to speak, of the universality of the idiom.
I would like to highlight two syntactic characteristics in this passage. The first, which is only suggested, is that the lawn is set up in a binary relationship with the ‘other’ landscape – the ‘dreary waste’. This binary of garden/wilderness is a central organising principle of lawn literature and is more explicitly articulated in passages from John Buchan’s The African Colony (1903), discussed in more detail later in this chapter. The second aspect is the metaphor of the interior evoked by Harris in images of the billiard-table and the soft carpet. The archive contains many other instances of interior language to describe lawns; the carpet is only the most regularly occurring (Eliovson 1983: 59; Kellaway 1907: 55; Martin 1983: 467; Rogers 1995; Sheat 1956: 15; Waugh 1926: 83).2 Thomas Meehan also tells us that a lawn is to the garden as ‘a tapestry is to the parlor’ (1868: 103); and Home Gardening in South Africa explains that a ‘well-kept lawn improves the appearance of a garden as much as a rich carpet improves the appearance of a room’ (Smith 1940: 216). The notion of the garden as an exterior room is an important concept that emerges in South Africa modernist planning discourse.
We know from historians that in eighteenth-century London ‘it was taken for granted that any house of reasonable size should have a billiard room’ (Polsky 1969: 22) and, while billiards could be played almost anywhere, for respectable gentlemen it was important to distance themselves from the morally deviant (who had more and more taken up billiards) and play at home or in upper-class meeting places. Harris’s gentlemanly figuration of the lawn as an interior space – a domestic space – complicates simple notions about the gendering of domesticity and asks to what degree lawn can be thought of as an exemplar of wilderness domestication.
Before moving on to a more thorough elaboration of the lawn/wilderness binary in Buchan, I want to draw attention to the painterly quality of Harris’s account. It is a description of a piece of land that has composed itself to be painted, a ‘scene’ that is decorated – ‘spangled’ and ‘shaded’. This notion of self-presentation, where the mountains ‘present themselves’ and the country ‘opens up’, is typical of a colonial picturesque (Pratt 2007: 59). Landscape is ‘mediated land, land that has been aesthetically processed,’ notes Malcom Andrews. ‘It is land that has arranged itself, or been arranged by the artistic vision, so that it is ready to sit for its portrait’ (1999: 7). There are two strongly related ideas here. One is nature arranging itself; the other is nature being arranged by the artistic vision. While the description may be in terms of an artistic vision, the idea that nature presents itself as lawn or garden (that it does not have to be re-presented as such, or transformed into lawn/garden) would seem to strengthen the domestication of nature.
The archive is packed with picturesque explanations of the lawn as the ‘groundwork’ of the ‘garden picture’ (Waugh 1926: 83). Jackson Downing has this to say about the artistic nature of the lawn: ‘As a general rule, the grass or surface of the lawn answers as the principal light, and the woods or plantations as the shadows, in the same manner in nature as in painting’ (1849: 109). Standard Garden Practice for Southern Africa suggests that a lawn is an ‘integral part of the garden picture’ (Sheat 1956: 15); Good Morning Gardeners says that a lawn can be said ‘to provide the canvas upon which the overall picture is painted’ (Jeffs 1964: 9); and Wilhelm Miller talks about ‘bold pictures on lawns’ (1913: 227). The painterly framing of the lawn reaches its apex in suburban guides where flowers and shrubs become compositional elements in amateur garden paintings. The Southern African Garden Manual, for example, exhorts its readers to ‘arrange shrub borders around the edge of the lawn … This will serve the same purpose as the frame to a picture’ (1958: 20). Uvedale Price, in Essays on the Picturesque, offers one of the very few contrarian opinions: ‘I have frequently heard it wondered at, that a green lawn, which is so charming in nature, should look so ill when painted … it does look miserably flat and insipid in a picture’ (1794: 291).
The man on the hilltop
John Buchan was a young man when Lord Alfred Milner, high commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Cape, recruited him in 1901. He was twenty-six when he arrived to supervise the improvement of conditions in Anglo-Boer War concentration camps (Dubow 2006: 188). He stayed for two years, during which time he wrote The African Colony: Studies in Reconstruction (1903). After leaving the colonial service in South Africa, Buchan continued to write prolifically, publishing well over 100 titles. Some works like The African Colony, with a very small print run and a direct focus on policy makers, were not well known outside of bureaucratic circles. Other publications were immensely popular; the spy novel The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) was even adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. In addition to his literary career, Buchan continued in imperial public service, which culminated in a baronetcy as the governor-general of Canada.
Whether he was working as an author or bureaucrat, landscape was foundational for Buchan; the land was the place from which to speak. Romantic notions of belonging, even destiny, pervade his work and laid the grounds for a nationalist interpretation of the South African landscape as the natural location for national identity. In Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa Jeremy Foster comments on this entanglement: ‘Strikingly lyrical passages of landscape description permeate all sections of The African Colony, leading one to ask whether it was intended as a sober political document promoting New Imperialism or a piece of impressionist landscape writing. The answer to this question is probably “both” ’ (2008: 121).
The African Colony makes the argument for a white South African national identity located not in language or even politics but rather in the landscape (Henshaw 2003: 13). In essence, it is a forceful argument for, explanation of and elaboration of Milner’s economic and political policies and, indeed, a response to Milner’s critics in London.
In Buchan’s own words, The African Colony is a kind of ‘Guide Book’ in three parts. Part I, ‘The Early Masters’, is a collection of ‘historical sketches’ dealing with the ‘native’, ‘uitlander’ and ‘Boer’, which, while attempting to articulate a sympathetic history of the Boer – as potential co-labourer with the British, as possessing ‘natural dignity beyond praise’ and an ‘antique kindliness’ (Buchan 1903: 74) – succeeded in causing much offence in its descriptions of the Boer’s ‘mental sluggishness’, ‘blind faith’ and ‘meagre imagination’ (70). Part II, ‘Notes of Travel’, offers a series of brief ‘carnets de voyage’ or travelogues concerned with the ‘configuration of the land’. These travel narratives ‘are devoted almost entirely to descriptions of unimproved, sparsely inhabited rural districts’ and not urban centres (Foster 2008: 122). Part II conforms to the rules that govern Victorian travel writing as laid out by Pratt in Imperial Eyes (2007). The most explicitly ‘non-political’ of the three sections, ‘Notes of Travel’ deploys what Pratt has termed ‘strategies of innocence’ – that is to say, ‘strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony’ (2007: 9). Part III, ‘The Political Problem’, offers a ‘modest diagnosis’ or what Buchan calls a ‘highly controversial sketch’ (1903: xvi) of the issues to be faced in South Africa. In prefacing his ‘diffidence’ with regard to this task, he apologises to his ‘friends’ (xviii) for his ‘audacity’ and frames his role as outside observer in terms of a landscape trope: ‘A critic on a neighbouring hill-top will be a poor guide to the flora and fauna of the parish below; but he may be a good authority on its contours, on the height of its hills and the number of its rivers, and he may, perhaps, be a better judge of the magnitude of a thunderstorm coming out of the west than the parishioner in his garden’ (xiii).
The passages I examine are from two different travelogues in Part II. Both are instances where Buchan deploys the lawn trope and in both cases he makes explicit reference to the conventions of Englishness. A binary between the inside/outside, garden/wilds and journey/arrival is set up in both passages. In the first instance, the ‘contrast’ Buchan suggests is ‘between the common veld and [the] garden’ (126); and in the second, between two different greens: the ‘dull green’, which he wishes would ‘give place to tender green’ (129).
A garden on the edge of the wilderness
The passage below is from ‘The Wood Bush’ (Buchan 1903: 113), the record of a journey dated January 1903. It describes a mid-summer afternoon in the lowveld, an area of which Buchan was exceedingly fond, which he called the ‘true Hesperides’ and the ‘New Eden’ (117). Buchan is astride his horse on the plateau of the Haenartsburg and describes the prospect below. He is the man on the hilltop, or what Pratt has called the ‘seeing-man’ (2007: 9):
It is England, richer, softer, kindlier, a vast demesne laid out as no landscape gardener could ever contrive, waiting for a human life worthy of such an environment. But it is more – it is that most fascinating of all types of scenery, a garden on the edge of a wilderness. And such a wilderness! Over the brink of the meadow, four thousand feet down, stretch the steaming fever flats. From a cool fresh lawn you look clear over a hundred miles of nameless savagery. The first contrast which fascinates the traveller is between the common veld and this garden; but the deeper contrast, which is a perpetual delight to the dweller, is between his temperate home and the rude wilds beyond his park wall. (Buchan 1903: 126)
In the garden on the edge of the wilderness, Buchan is writing the lawn into being, providing a memory of a lawn which is not real, not yet. The ‘lawn’ Captain Harris wrote about was drawn from memories of British landscapes he had seen, as was Buchan’s lawn. But Harris was not a bureaucrat, officially charged with solving problems of land resettlement and immigration. Buchan was officially empowered to look, with the clear intent to find places that were suitable, habitable. So, moved by the landscape, his search shifts towards finding a life ‘worthy’ of the environment, rather than the other way around. Buchan sees a lawn that does not exist but that, in part as a result of the text he wrote, would actually become a lawn.
Following the notion that for Buchan the lawn originates linguistically – it is first of all written – it is worth analysing the things the lawn does in this passage: firstly, it provides a place, on which to stand, from which to look, from which to write; and secondly, the lawn (that is to say, the ‘lawn-contrast’) fascinates and delights. This place comes about through a set of oppositions or contrasts and is the appropriate place from which to appreciate them. Essentially the binary in operation is between lawn and wilderness, which is underpinned by a more fundamental binary between civilised and uncivilised. This binary is elaborated descriptively as the ‘inside’ (garden, richer, softer, kindlier, cool, fresh, temperate, home), in opposition to the ‘outside’ (common veld, rude, steaming, nameless savagery). Aside from the explicit articulation of the South African wilderness as ‘veld’, set up against the garden, and the expected colonial racial language (savagery) and class language (rude/kindly), I want to draw attention to the passage’s structuring of difference through temperature. While it may be sensible to claim that lawns actually do feel cooler than some other ground surfaces, especially in Africa, it is worth noting that the lawn’s coolness is generally collocated with terms like hygiene, ‘clean, cool’ (Waugh 1926: 83) and cultivation, ‘cool, green, cultivated’ (Eliovson 1968: 113). It can hardly be claimed that Buchan’s contrast between the ‘cool, fresh, temperate’ garden with ‘steaming fever flats’ is a description dealing with empirical notions of hot and cold. It is not that the ‘steaming fever flats’ are bad per se; their hotness is necessary. Without the heat the temperate garden would be rather boring. It is worth noting how often temperature is thought of as an appearance rather than a feeling; as both Sima Eliovson (1968: 113) and E. N. Anderson note, the lawn ‘looks cool’ (1972: 180; emphasis added). Without the nameless (unnameable), sensual, uncivilised flats, the accomplishment of the garden would only be ‘England’, not ‘richer, softer, kindlier’, for that requires the comparative logic, richer (than), softer (than), kindlier (than). This relational grammar sets up repetitive contrasts that move from a simple contrast to a ‘deeper’ contrast. The simple contrast is for the traveller, but the deeper contrast, which is delightful, is reserved for the dweller.
In order for this logic to function, a boundary concept is required to mark what is ‘in’ and ‘out’ and, therefore, who or what is civilised, uncivilised, civilisable. Buchan’s description demarcates and encloses the lawn with an ‘edge’, a ‘brink’, a ‘park wall’.
One is struck that there already is a ‘natural’ border: the brink of the meadow. Buchan shrinks and domesticates the panoramic view, ending with the ‘park wall’. Furthermore, the idea of garden and countryside forming an undivided whole differs from the physical and conceptual divisions that govern the Buchan passage. So, apart from the idea of a boundary between garden and wilderness, one also has the idea of the garden being united with the environment.
The notion that the lawn is bounded is both fundamental and implicit, just as it is mostly subtly articulated in the literature. That the lawn must end is a certainty; how it ends is a matter of taste. Price preferred ‘a just gradation from highly embellished to simple nature: just as the polished lawn … does afterwards to the wilder wood-walks and pastures’ (1810: 165). The ‘gradation’ Price advocated was made possible by the innovation of the ‘ha-ha’, which was a sunken barrier or a ditch that kept the grazing animals out of the garden without interrupting the vistas. It first appears in La théorie et la pratique du jardinage by A. J. Dezallier d’Argenville (published in 1709), translated into English as The Theory and Practice of Gardening (published in 1712) and then taken up by nobleman Horace Walpole in On Modern Gardening, where he called it the ‘Ha! Ha!’, the ‘capital stroke [in] the destruction of walls for boundaries’ (1780: 59). That the ability of the ha-ha to hide boundaries and to ‘create the illusion that the garden and the surrounding countryside was one and undivided’ (Thacker 1985: 183) should have become so fashionable at the very moment of accelerated enclosures gives pause for thought. Later writers sometimes preferred a more explicit border ‘of shrubbery [that] makes a lawn more beautiful, because it acts like the frame of a picture’ (Miller 1913: 91).
The question of how to define the boundary of the lawn is fundamental to the definition of the concept of the North American lawn and has led to some fiery literary scuffles – such as the tiff that took place between Eugene Klapp, editor of The House Beautiful (1897), and Wilhelm Miller of Garden Magazine (1909). Klapp, drawing on French and British examples, made the argument for picturesque walls and fences in order to end the ‘monotony’ of American yard culture and to provide more privacy. Miller strongly disagreed, insisting that the lawn, connected to the public domain, is a gesture of civil solidarity: ‘The American idea is to have the front yard of every small place composed of an unbroken lawn … This frank, open treatment which subordinates the individual’s rights to the park-like effect of the whole street, is fit expression of a democratic people. But such publicity is abhorrent to the English, with whom privacy is the dominant passion’ (Miller 2000: 51).
The North American lawn is what Michael Pollan calls an ‘egalitarian conceit’ (1998: 4). The seemingly unbounded front lawn presents the illusion of a collective landscape, which is held in a kind of common. This common is, however, at odds with and structured by the competing claims of private ownership, which must be seen to be relinquished for the greater good of the park-like effect. Thus, public displays of private ownership take on an implicitly political character, a democratic ideal expressed through conformity. Lawn maintenance and lawn conformity, that is to say, the willingness and ability to blend your landscape, takes on a moral and civic quality.
In American Green Ted Steinberg supposes that the American lawn ideal was exported to Canada, Australia and New Zealand (2006: 62) but there is little evidence to support this claim. Instead, the literature supports the idea that the modern lawn is derived from and is a more or less successful approximation of the English lawn. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, writers on both sides of the Atlantic ascribed, if not ‘ownership’, then certainly mastery of the lawn to the English. Even Jackson Downing, who is credited by some historians with ‘importing’ the English tradition to the United States (Macinnis 2009: 66), acknowledged that ‘the unrivalled beauty of the “velvet lawns” of England has passed into proverb’ (1849: 525). The Gardeners’ Magazine of Botany, Horticulture, Floriculture, and Natural Science notes that ‘smooth, polished turf is one of the principal charms of the English garden’ (1850: 148) and Reginald Blomfield writes, ‘The turf of an English garden is probably the most perfect in the world’ (1892: 143). Two further examples: ‘the English brought across the sea the memory of the green lawns of England and did their best to make memory a reality’ (Fairbridge 1924: 41) and ‘a fine green swathe is the epitome of the English Garden’ (King & Oudolf 1998: 22).
Buchan not only imagined an English sense to the landscape, he also imagined an English sense of ownership. As W. J. T. Mitchell has emphasised, the ‘ “prospect” that opens up is not just a spatial scene but a projected future of “development” and exploitation’ (1994a: 17). Buchan’s reference to the ‘demesne’ suggests that he ‘was imagining a quasi-feudal, pre-capitalist ownership of the land, with the implication that local people would be allowed little more status than rural serfs’ (Wittenberg 2004: 131). The Oxford English Dictionary describes a demesne as ‘land immediately attached to a mansion, and held along with it for use or pleasure’. By referring to the landscape as a demesne, Buchan attaches the land to a grand home, presuming an owner, of both home and lands. For Buchan, the landscape he finds is still ‘waiting for a human life worthy’ of it and The African Colony should be read as a kind of advertisement intended to attract white English immigration as part of Milner’s plan to ensure imperial domination.
Lawn trouble
The second passage from Buchan is something of a Victorian temper tantrum, dated August 1903. Taken from the beginning of Chapter 10, ‘The Great Road North’ (Buchan 1903: 146), the extract describes his trip in the Transvaal, from the Repatriation Depot at Pietersburg. He spends some time on the topic of ‘The Road’, the imagined highway from the Cape to Egypt, on which he is travelling. The road, he writes, is ‘insufficiently provided with water’, has no signposts, no inns, no ‘white habitations’ and at some points must be navigated by ‘the eye of Faith’. To the frustrated writer, it is as if ‘lions [did] the survey work and wild pigs the engineering’ (148)!
The passage in question is one of Buchan’s ‘arrival scenes’, a narrative type that is ‘a convention of almost every variety of travel writing and serves as a particularly potent site for framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its representation’ (Pratt 2007: 77). Buchan and his men are about to set up camp for the night. He describes the dusk; it is August, winter, and the veld is ‘bleak, dusty … a sombre grey’:
The great mountain walls were dim with twilight, but there was day enough left to see the immediate environs of the road. They had a comical suggestion of a dilapidated English park … the coarse bush grass seemed like neglected turf. It is a resemblance which dogs one through the bush veld. You are always coming to the House and never arriving. At every turn you expect a lawn, a gleam of water, a grey wall; soon, surely, the edges will be clipped, the sand will cease, the dull green will give place to the tender green of watered grass. But the House remains to be found. (Buchan 1903: 151)
I want to draw attention to two grammatical elements in this passage: the lack of lawn care (‘dilapidated’, ‘neglected’) and softness (‘coarse bush grass’/‘tender green of watered grass’). J. M. Coetzee’s analysis of the picturesque in White Writing addresses the likelihood of ‘the European eye’ being disappointed in Africa if it seeks in African landscapes European tones and shades (1988: 39). The ‘white’ eye is ‘continually on the lookout for green’, and thus the lack of deep greens, shade and subtle modulations of light, and the limited reflective surfaces of water frustrate the imposition of picturesque conventions (42).
In the scene above Buchan is writing the anti-lawn: a landscape evocation that stands in contrast to the lawn. The anti-lawn is not a repository of wilderness: this is the tension set up, in the previous scene, between a lawn (real or imagined, it does not matter) and the wilderness. In this case, the anti-lawn is the imagining of dilapidation and neglect – not as the opposite of the colony, but as a sign of its anxiety. Buchan’s picture of the neglected and dilapidated ‘lawn’ draws on and inverts the archetype of the ‘well-kept’ lawn. Nominally, a well-kept space refers to one that is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘maintained in good order or condition’ and is ‘clean, tidy and cared for’ (Cambridge Dictionary). The disappointment of the passage is caused not only by the absence of lawn but also by the absence of ‘the House’. The lawn implies habitation, permanence and care. It also marks the end of a journey, a return to the domestic, which the relentless African landscape never seems to provide. Buchan is dogged by a suggestion that the lawn is ultimately only a comic resemblance. He wishes to impose the orderliness of lawn onto the landscape but is defeated.
Experts advise that a lawn must not only be kept, but it must also be well kept. Keeping implies a keeper who owns, or is paid to care for, the lawn and the capacity, knowledge, competencies, capital, tools, materials and desires that make it possible to do the labour of keeping the lawn. The literature is full of advice on what to do to attain ‘the restful delight of a well-kept lawn’ (Jeffs 1964: 9), including trimming leading to a ‘well-kept air’ (Taylor 2008: 277) and mowing in ‘stripes [to] emphasise the calm and orderliness of a well-kept lawn’ (Johnson 1979: 154). On a secondary level, one encounters a question of capacity and evaluation: how to know if a lawn is well kept and to be able to take pleasure in it. A well-kept lawn ‘is not only a joy to its owner but all those whose privilege it is to admire its gracious expanse of verdure’ (Jeffs 1964: 9).
The reading of Buchan’s passage can be augmented with that of another imperialist – James Froude, writing about his travels through the colonies a few years earlier. In Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, Froude describes his arrival at a homestead in Australia. In his account, the well-kept lawn is an important indicator of the family’s accomplishment of Englishness and of their class position: ‘A clean-mown and carefully-watered lawn, with tennis-ground and croquet-ground … we had arrived, in fact, at an English aristocrat’s country house reproduced in another hemisphere, and shone upon at night by other constellations. Inside, the illusion was even more complete … We found a high-bred English family – English in everything except that they were Australian-born, and cultivated perhaps above the English average’ (1886: 121). The lawn that Froude ‘discovers’ (for surely it is a discovery, a ‘non-event’) is, in Homi Bhabha’s formulation, ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (1994: 86). The lawn appears to be a convincing ‘reproduction’ and completed ‘illusion’, except that, as Froude notes later in the passage, instead of ‘our delicate grass there is buffalo-grass, whose coarse fibre no care in mow’ing [sic] can conceal’ (quoted in Macinnis 2009: 93). Bhabha’s conception of mimicry as resemblance containing ‘both mockery and a certain menace’ (1994: 86) can help to explain why Buchan would have described the landscape’s imperfections as ‘comical’, and why Eliovson would worry that a badly kept lawn would be a ‘mockery’ (1968: 113). The lawn ‘reproduced in another hemisphere’ will be ‘a “blurred copy” … that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery, since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 125). This failure to fully approximate is unsettling because it ‘locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of the colonized’. The colonial lawn cannot be complete; it is a ‘resemblance which dogs one’, suggesting a ‘house’, suggesting a ‘gleam of water’, suggesting a ‘grey wall’ and enclosing a property to which you ‘are always coming … and never arriving’ (Buchan 1903: 151).
Unkind soil
‘Botany at the point of political unification of South Africa was an activity for people who had plenty of leisure time and high-society connections’ (Anker 2001: 54). Dorothea Fairbridge was one such well-connected Cape lady. The ‘romantic and charismatic doyen of South African Englishness’ (Dubow 2006: 187), she was one of the leading members of the so-called ‘Closer Union’ loyalists, ‘a group of architects, artists, writers, historians, archivists and photographers, all of whom were dedicated to the idea of a united South Africa’ (Merrington 1995: 653) and who ‘would encourage imperial links, along with a conciliatory sense of national heritage’ (Merrington 1999: 230). Fairbridge was closely connected to Lord Milner – with whom she is rumoured to have had an affair (Dick 2005: 6) – and Lady Florence Phillips, who was her friend and patron. Florence Phillips, the wife of Randlord Sir Lionel Phillips, a prominent social and cultural figure in the country, was a co-founder of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. As well as supporting Fairbridge’s writing, Lady Phillips also commissioned and sponsored the lumbering and weighty Flora of South Africa by Rudolf Marloth (1913–32). She also, after 1910, funded The State, a pro-Union periodical, which was orientated towards the ‘construction of a new ameliorative South African identity’ (Merrington 1995: 654) and included articles on design by Fairbridge and Herbert Baker and other friends.
Fairbridge’s coterie successfully lobbied for the founding of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden and the Botanical Society in the Cape, a major coup in the ongoing battle between the Cape botanists and the officially sanctioned Pretoria Herbarium (Carruthers 2011: 259; Dubow 2006). In addition to being a founding member of the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, whose subtitle ‘Daughters of the Empire’ left little doubt about their political allegiances (Dick 2005: 6), she also was a founder of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Michaelis Art Collection (Merrington 1995). Fairbridge was a well-regarded writer. She penned five novels, the controversial A History of South Africa (published in 1918), a number of heritage-related and botanical publications, travelogues, essays, short stories and articles.
Gardens of South Africa was published in 1924 and emerged during what Foster calls the ‘ “heyday of landscape”, a time when the discursive use of landscape as a prop of imaginary identity was most intense in South Africa’ (2005: 302). The book is a tangle of political philosophy, race theory, botany, name dropping, garden history and practical garden advice: House & Leisure magazine meets Thomas Malthus. There are many uncomfortable moments in the text, including a discussion on the virtues of kikuyu grass, which was then new in the Transvaal (Fairbridge 1924: 34), alongside zealous imperial, and racist, exhortations like ‘[the] gardens that grow peacefully on the lands that were once the Black Man’s and may be the Black Man’s again if the White Folk of South Africa let themselves forget the necessity for standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to hold the land for Civilisation’ (37). It is unfortunate, according to some (Merrington 1995; Wylie 2011), though not at all surprising, that Fairbridge’s writing has remained unfashionable after apartheid and also under-theorised. The passage below is taken from an anecdote on ‘mine gardens’ of the Reef, which for Fairbridge ‘present a different problem’:
They are set in surroundings which are sometimes frankly ugly and always bare and uncompromising. Yet, note what love can do. In a locality that seems made of mining gear, dust … you may open a gate and pass into little gardens with emerald lawns … little gardens upon which some woman has spent herself in the passionate love of loveliness and a craving for beauty in a world of unredeemed utilitarianism … Think of the courage of it and the rare quality of soul … content to feel that she has redeemed thirteen corners of the Reef from ugliness … but the soil of the mines is poor and thin, this must first be supplemented by good earth brought from a more kindly area. (1924: 34)
The Reef is ‘frankly ugly’ for two reasons. The first is Fairbridge’s dislike of the industrial aesthetic of the Reef and the scars upon the landscape. The criticism of capitalist aesthetics is in keeping with the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement exemplified in John Ruskin’s 1862 opposition to industrialisation and capitalism in Unto This Last. The second is because the Reef environment itself, apart from being scarred and damaged, was at odds with Cape-based Fairbridge’s national landscape and garden picture. For her New-Imperial eyes, the lawn trope offered hope for articulating one possible commonality of landscape across the nation, but also great frustration. Because of the Reef’s geographic and climatic conditions, especially the lack of winter rainfall and winter frost, the ‘vivid green lawns … turn golden and the gardens compose themselves to sleep’ (Fairbridge 1924: 34). It was in this context that Fairbridge was involved with Pole Evans, the head of Botany and Plant Pathology in the Department of Agriculture, who managed the planting of kikuyu grass for the lawns at the Union Buildings (Fairbridge 1924: 36; Stapf 1921: 88).
The Reef is depicted as ugly, bare, uncompromising, thin-soiled and the woman’s little garden (or more correctly her gardening) is presented as beautiful, the redemption of this dusty utilitarian life. In Fairbridge, goodness and beauty are knotted together in notions like ‘good earth’, gardening as an act of ‘redemption’, and the idea that good soil and good grass can, and should, be brought from somewhere else. The prayerful acts of gardening, even the subtle mirroring of ‘soil’ and ‘soul’, have their origins in the primogenial gardening texts of medieval Dominican bishop Albertus Magnus. In his forty-volume encyclopaedic account of the vita occulta or the ‘hidden life’ of plants, Magnus argues:
Nothing refreshes the sight so much as fine short grass. One must clear the space destined for a pleasure garden of all roots, and this can hardly be achieved unless the roots are dug out, the surface levelled, as much as possible, and boiling water is poured over the surface, so that the remaining roots and seeds which lie in the ground are destroyed and cannot germinate … The ground must then be covered with turves cut from good [meadow] grass, and beaten down with wooden mallets, and stamped down well with the feet until they are hardly able to be seen. Then little by little the grass pushes through like fine hair, and covers the surface like a fine cloth. (quoted in Thacker 1985: 84)
The notion that the lawn refreshes the ‘sight’, or the ‘eye’ in Petrus de Crescentiis’s later transcription (1305), or the ‘eyes’ in the earlier De claustro animae (of 1172) by Hugues de Fouilloy – ‘the green lawn of the cloister garden refreshes the eyes of the beholder and recalls to their minds … the future life’ (quoted in MacDougall 1986: 51) – recurs in a number of other places. Speaking about the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, John Merriman, former premier of the Cape Colony, said: ‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’ (quoted in Carruthers 2011: 264).
The goodness and beauty of the lawn is not, however, value free. In The Theory of Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen writes that while lawn has ‘sensuous beauty … to the eye of nearly all races and classes … it is, perhaps, unquestionably more beautiful to the eye of the dolichoblond than to most other varieties of men’ (2007: 90). There seem to me four things to say about the beauty of the lawn here. First, its beauty is seemingly ‘undeniable’, ‘unquestionable’. According to Gardening with Grasses, ‘The beauty of a well-maintained lawn is undeniable’ (King & Oudolf 1998: 23). Second, to be more accurate, it is really the well-maintained lawn that is unquestionably beautiful. The badly kept lawn, or in Buchan’s earlier example, the ‘neglected turf’, can be ugly or is ugly: ‘In order to get out of grass-work its full possibility of beauty, it is necessary that decent order and restraint, that fine sobriety of taste that once reigned paramount over all the arts of design in England’ be maintained (Blomfield 1892: 143). Third, it seems that it is ‘grass-work’, the gardening activities and labour in Fairbridge’s example of ‘spending’ oneself on the lawn, and not necessarily the lawn itself, that is beautiful and virtuous. Lastly, the beauty of the lawn tends to be more readily discerned by those of the correct race or class, those with ‘fine sobriety of taste’, those with the predisposition to observe how beautiful the lawn is.
It is important to stress the gendered dimensions of lawn work that Fairbridge’s texts bring up. It has been argued that historically Western women of a certain class tended to focus on flowers (Hoyles 1991; Munroe 2006; Taylor 2008). Nevertheless, even as early as 1707, Charles Evelyn wrote in Lady’s Recreation to ‘encourage women to lay out orangeries, lawns’ (quoted in Bell 1990: 476). The invention of new lighter, easier-to-use lawnmowers from the nineteenth century onwards encouraged the idea that woman could mow. As a 1952 editorial in House and Gardens claimed, ‘it was no more difficult than running your vacuum cleaner’. Notwithstanding the appeals of futuristic advertisements, the reality is that in South Africa at least, a ‘garden boy’ would likely have done most of the mowing.
There were exceptions to this argument. For instance, Marion Cran writes in The Gardens of Good Hope (1927: 166–168) of a Mr and Mrs Webber who lived in a Herbert Baker home in Johannesburg. He collected succulents for his ‘kopie garden’ and below this were his wife’s green lawns and coloured borders. ‘She leaves all the rock gardening to him, being absorbed in the lawns, borders and pergolas of her part of their domain’ (166). In addition, Cran had the opportunity to meet the ‘jobbing gardener of Johannesburg’, Mrs Soames, ‘a delightful little laughing lady whose old two-cylinder Renault is a familiar sight, jogging along the streets of the city, loaded with trays of plants for sale’ (169). The peculiarity of this female jobber, who worked with ‘a heart full of sweetness’, foreshadows later lady landscapers, such as Joane Pim, who experienced pronounced gender-based discrimination (Foster 2015; Murray 2010). Mrs Soames also had in her employment that ‘precious possession’, ‘a well-trained and devoted native servant; he is called Solomon, and grinned with wide appreciation when my hostess presented me as the “big Missis who writes books”. Solomon has been eight years in her service, and he loves flowers. He was pricking out stocks, godetias and granadillas with fastidious care when we came round, his black face bent with deep attention over the delicate task.’
The ugly/beautiful binary is one articulation of the dialectical relationship in which lawn is constituted. The relational grammar of Fairbridge’s passage sets up oppositions between the mine authorities and the gardener in her garden. The binary system here is obviously gendered: Fairbridge tells us it is ‘her garden’, ‘her lawn’, on which ‘she spent herself’, her pursuit. The ‘craving for beauty and a passionate love of loveliness’ is figured as feminine, in antagonism to the utilitarian masculinism that surrounds her. Commerce is set against domesticity, the public realm against private space, utilitarianism against beauty, and usefulness, productivity and efficiency against the lawn. The rampant industrialisation of the highveld would no doubt have sharpened these contrasts. The Arts and Crafts movement tended to depict lawn as a romantic foil for capitalism, as is the case in Ruskin’s comparison of underappreciated and underpaid gardening labour compared with better-paid factory labour: the comparison of ‘green velvet’ worked with seed and a scythe compared to ‘red velvet’ worked with silk and scissors (1862: n.p.).
The gate – which can open and close – is the marker of a boundary and implies the crossing of a threshold to enter an inside. The gate marks the entry into the private space of the domestic realm. The garden is figured as a retreat, with the lawn providing a kind of domestic protection and safety. This stands in opposition to Harris and Buchan, whose manly lawns exemplify the conceptual and physical expansion of colonial power. Fairbridge’s lawn is delicate, vulnerable actually. David Bunn has argued that closer attention ought to be paid to ‘the role played by landscape in the reproduction of a gendered distinction between domestic interiors and a male public sphere’ (1994: 147; emphasis in original). This passage brings into particular focus the notion of the lawn as gendered and as the ground for gender-specific activity.
Fairbridge continues her narrative with reference to the obliteration of the lawn, and presumably the entire home: ‘Many blows have been rained upon her garden; in one instance the mine authorities decreed that a shaft should be sunk in the middle of her lawn, just when it had attained the perfection of velvet smoothness’ (1924: 35). A crude action indeed; sinking a shaft into an unwilling, perfect, velvety smooth lawn seems very ungentlemanly. The intrusion into the female domestic space is figured both as a muscular masculinity and as aligned with nature, for the blows ‘rain’ down. The metaphor of rape is difficult to avoid. In this instance the boundary is defined by two kinds of permeability: both horizontally, by a visitor or the narrator who could walk inside, and vertically, by the rain (of blows) of the mining shaft coming down into the garden and the earth.
Lawn labour
Sima Eliovson was an amateur gardener-turned-author of popular gardening books in apartheid-era South Africa. She was a contemporary of Una van der Spuy, author of Wild Flowers of South Africa for the Garden (1971), and Joane Pim, landscaper of Welkom and the gardens of Oppenheimer’s Brenthurst, and author of the landscape polemic Beauty is Necessary (1971).
Eliovson published twelve books on mid-century suburban gardening, including books on wildflowers, Japanese gardening, Namaqualand flowers, proteas and Brazilian modernist gardening. The books are typical of their genre and include advice and guidance, Latin names of plants, historical explanations and case studies, illustrations and photographs (which she took herself, with her husband’s help). Her most popular book was her first, South African Flowers for the Garden (published in 1955), which was inspired by the challenges of taking up residence in a new home with a ‘wattle plantation as a garden’ and the dearth of literature to help her confront this problem.3 She notes in the introduction the exhaustive research she conducted, consulting all available sources – Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the Royal Horticultural Society at Kew Register, Flowering Plants of South Africa, Rudolf Marloth’s Flora of South Africa – complemented by experience in her own garden.
It is worth noting that, like Eliovson, both Una van der Spuy in the 1970s and Ruby Boddam-Whetham, writing in the 1930s, were writing from and about their own gardens. Their experiences in their private gardens and the (sometimes) intimate relationships with their black labourers form a seam that runs through their work.
For instance, ‘Old Nectar’, Van der Spuy’s historic Cape Dutch homestead, was the backdrop for many a rose photograph and was, in the end, the focus of her last book, Old Nectar: A Garden for All Seasons (published in 2010). Her gardener was John Mashati, whom she thanked in the introduction to Wild Flowers of South Africa for the Garden.
Boddam-Whetham’s book A Garden in the Veld (1933) is, among other things, a record of her and her ‘garden boy’ Blesbok’s battles with the veld around her new home Kirklington. Bought in 1911 by her husband, the farm near Ficksburg in the Orange Free State was named directly after his family’s English home Kirklington (Gardiner 1991: 56–61). Cran describes him as one of a scattering of British ‘gentleman farmers’ who have ‘taken their expensive educations and their traditions of honour’ and have ‘reinvested the name of their calling with romance’: ‘They work in the bush and on the veld in shirts and shorts, use their hands, talk and act like gentle-people, and are altogether a most attractive type. They come back to the old world now and again, sunburned men and women, bringing with them whilst they visit us something of the magic of the spacious lands beyond’ (Cran 1927: 244–245). She met his wife while doing the research for The Gardens of Good Hope (1927). She describes her as ‘a slim, dark-eyed brooding woman, who moves like a priestess among her torch lilies and roses; she is, above all, an observer and a dreamer who sees the possibilities of hybridisation in a land where the hybridist’s patience and vision are hardly yet surmised’ (178–179).
Ruby was not enamoured of the harsh surroundings, so she set about building a romantic garden with lawns, ‘long, wide terraces, high walls and steps of dressed stone’ (Gardiner 1991: 56). The gardens were planted with a hybrid of ‘indigenous plants, and many flowers of the veld [which] took the place of less hardy species, though some of these showed reluctance at being “caged” ’. Ruby was a frail woman and spent most of her days in the shade barking orders at her gardeners, writing about their exploits and enjoying the garden at night. In addition to Blesbok, she gardened with ‘two-and-a-half kaffir boys’ her husband had ‘given’ her from the farm (Boddam-Whetham 1933: 111).
Writing from one’s own garden and with immense physical assistance could account for the staggering first line of the introductory paragraph of Chapter 24, ‘The Lawn’, in Eliovson’s The Complete Gardening Book for Southern Africa: ‘It is probably true to say that every garden in Southern Africa has a lawn … The lawn, therefore, is one of the most important features to every homeowner, who realises that it enhances the value of his property, prevents dust from entering the house, provides a pleasant playground for his children and last, not least, gives his ground a cool, green, cultivated look that implies peace’ (1968: 113).
Eliovson concludes with a stern warning: without sufficient care ‘the lawn will deteriorate and be a mockery of what it should be’ (1968: 113). It is safe to say that not every garden in South Africa had a lawn in 1968. But then Eliovson was not really writing about every garden: she was writing about white people’s gardens, white people who were legally able to buy their own homes, could afford her books, the water bills, the lawn food, compost, ant-killer, sprinkler systems and the black labour to work the garden. Indeed, in her Garden Design for Southern Africa Eliovson goes so far as to say: ‘If you do not have labour at hand … then it is better to think along the lines … of lawn substitute’ (1983: 30). A sensible recommendation, but would a ‘lawn substitute’ still enhance property values, prevent dust, provide a pleasant playground for children and give the garden a cool, green, cultivated look that implies peace? Perhaps somewhat, but what it would not achieve is the display of the means to create and maintain a lawn. The ‘lawn substitute’ is laid out like a stage for those who did not have labour, a kind of second prize of garden surface treatments, for those white folks of the wrong class position. What Eliovson is saying is that it is preferable to have no lawn at all, rather than a badly kept one. No lawn means that the location – the terrain – on which white, patriarchal, middle-class, heterosexual, healthy, capitalist family life is lived, is barer, but still intact. An insufficiently cared-for lawn, however, is an incitement, a ‘mockery’; it is dangerous. Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of mockery as an ‘insincere, contemptible, or impertinent imitation’ and ‘a subject of laughter’ points towards some of the postcolonial conceptions of mimicry addressed in Buchan’s Great Road narrative. Lawn substitutes like the tiled or paved-over gardens of Portuguese immigrants to the highveld (Vladislavić 2009: 20), or obviously synthetic artificial turf, such as in the film Triomf (Raeburn 2008), are, from a class perspective, also a kind of mockery.
Having ‘labour at hand’ was not a general concern for many white homeowners during apartheid. David Harrison in his critique The White Tribe of Africa writes: ‘A hard day’s work in the garden for many white[s] starts off in the car. He will drive to one of the many unmarked yet well-known pick-up points in the suburbs where he will find black mine workers … Thus he can sit back and enjoy his Sunday lunch, give the “garden boy” his bread and jam and tea, take a nap till the digging is done’ (1983: 78).
The invisibility of labour in the landscape is echoed in Coetzee’s study of the pastoral in South African writing. ‘Blindness to the colour black is built into South African pastoral,’ writes Coetzee in White Writing. ‘What inevitably follows is the occlusion of black labour from the scene: the black man becomes a shadowy presence flitting across the stage now and then’ (1988: 5).
Coetzee’s notion of ‘blindness’ is poignantly evident in Angela Read Lloyd’s writing about gardener and artist Moses Tladi (1897–1959), who worked for her grandfather Herbert Read at his home Lokshoek on the Parktown Ridge. Tladi tended a garden designed by Harry Clayton (Read Lloyd 2009: 18), which included a tennis court, pergola, croquet lawn, herbaceous borders and a lawn of fine grass (kikuyu and other coarse grasses had not yet come into use) (2–3). The house also had a ‘staff lawn with granadilla creepers’ (11). Tladi depicted the Lokshoek garden (at Read’s suggestion) in a number of his paintings as well as his own garden of the home in Kensington B, from which he and his family were removed under the Group Areas Act (see Plate 2). He is often considered South Africa’s first black landscape painter (Caccia 1993). In The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi, Read Lloyd writes that she remembers Tladi as ‘a dark man blending in as part of the company: tending the ferns, wheeling a barrow along the grass, tying and trimming. He seems serene, and is certainly a benign presence. I cannot see this man’s face’ (2009: 19). She wonders why she cannot remember Tladi. There are obviously many possible reasons, one of which was that she was just a little girl at the time. The hard truth is that for many white South Africans black domestic labourers were (and indeed remain) anonymous, nameless, faceless, history-less. The workers are a part of the background.
Read Lloyd’s history of Tladi has a tendency to bathe his existence in her childhood garden with warm sunshine, softening and sentimentalising his presence: ‘Images of childhood would forever belong in that garden, suffused with some magical light. In memory, that early, beautiful time remained the same, always. But many years went by before I realized that my paradise-garden was a place created and tended by Moses Tladi; a place where he had first begun to paint, and to explore the techniques of his art. That “artist’s garden” had truly been his’ (Read Lloyd 2009: 13).
A thing so familiar to the eye
The discourse of lawns is characterised by an overwhelming sense of agreement about the lawn – how it works, who it is for and what one should do with it. The norm is presented as a flat, green, soft, cool surface, which is understood to be an English colonial import, bringing with it transferred and transformed notions of class, race, gender and sexuality. It is also a discursive imposition on the landscape, in many cases one that has not (yet) been made. Where the lawn is imagined or read into the landscape, the discourse becomes indicative of the desire for belonging, for Englishness, and also an expression of melancholy. As a pursuit of an idea of order and civility over and against the perceived wilderness, the lawn is ‘kept’ in a dialectical relationship with wilderness and always bounded. Sometimes it is literally bounded; at other times and places that boundedness is repeated discursively when the landscape is perceived as resisting domestication. The lawn is always confronted by all that is NOT lawn. The making and keeping of the lawn, both discursively and corporeally, is characterised by anxiety. The lawn seems to be located on the borderline between desire and anxiety. This is all the more so as, by its very nature and as I have argued, the lawn is always a provisional accomplishment, always prone to decay, never final; impermanent, and thus imposing a regime of order as it requires and wants constant attention. The peculiarity of the lawn is that more than any other thing in the garden, it requires being kept; its visual comforts remain elusive, particularly on the highveld, which became the heart of South African industrialisation and modernisation. Because of this, the availability of labour was an essential condition, particularly for large lawns. From this, one could argue that the history of the South African lawn cannot be separated from its social and labour histories.
In conclusion I want to touch on an exemplary statement by famous garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932). She was a garden designer and prolific garden writer influenced by Arts and Crafts principles and the work of John Ruskin and William Morris. She is known for her ideas about the cottage garden and for her association with the architect Edwin Lutyens. (It is rumoured that she was the inspiration behind Lutyens’s designs for Joubert Park.) This is from her treatise Some English Gardens:
That close, fine turf of the gardens of Britain is a thing so familiar to the eye that we scarcely think what a wonderful thing it really is. When we consider our flower and kitchen gardens, and remember how much labour of renewal they need – renewal not only of the plants themselves, but of the soil, in the way of manurial and other dressings; and when we consider all the digging and delving, raking and hoeing that must be done as ground preparation, constantly repeated; and then when we think again of an ancient lawn of turf, perhaps three hundred years old, that, except for mowing and rolling, has, for all those long years, taken care of itself; it seems, indeed, that the little closely interwoven plants of grass are things of wonderful endurance and longevity. (Jekyll & Elgood 1904: 104)
For Jekyll it is a pleasure to see the lawn anew, to defamiliarise it, because she then notices its ‘wonderful endurance and longevity’. It is a concern that by presenting so vast a historical span of the lawn in this chapter (which is, of course, necessary) I might contribute to the notion of the lawn’s terrible permanence. For while it is certainly old, an ‘ancient’ thing, what I am hoping to point towards are its limits – and even more strongly how it is philosophically constituted by its limits and its limitations. I want to, not so subtly, move towards the argument that the lawn is a temporary accomplishment, or what Ms Hirsh in the novel Another Country refers to as a ‘provisional victory’ (Schoeman 1991: 33). I hope to foreground the notion that the lawn is not permanent; it can die, it turns brown; it needs constant, vigilant, ‘dictatorial’ attention. It causes anxiety because it is never fully accomplished, it is always about to fall (is always already falling) into disrepair. Contrary to Jekyll’s observation that the lawn ‘needs very little attention’ and takes ‘care of itself’, it appears instead that what a lawn wants is our constant attention.
