Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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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