Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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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