Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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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: