Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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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 His precision made his records of African fauna useful in the imperial metropole and interesting as historical documents rather than literary creations.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