Introduction:

       The Lawn is Singing

       There is a way in which the dryness of the winter veld, when the sun is very harsh and the grass is bleached very white, or else is very black from veld fires, corresponds to the tonal range of a white sheet of paper and charcoal and charcoal dust – in a way more immediately even than oil paint. There was a way in which the winter veld fires, in which the grass is burned to black stubble, made drawings of themselves. You could rub a sheet of paper across the landscape itself, and you would come up with a charcoal drawing.

       — William Kentridge, ‘Meeting the World Halfway:

       A Johannesburg Biography’

      William Kentridge (2010) observes that for much of his childhood in Johannesburg he felt that he ‘had been cheated of a landscape’. He explains that he wanted a landscape of ‘forests, of trees, of brooks’ but instead he had ‘dry veld, beyond the green gardens of the city’. The ‘veld’ is a particularly South African notion. Originally a Dutch word meaning ‘field’ or ‘countryside’, in Afrikaans it describes a field, pasture, plain, territory or ground, and in South African botany it is used to describe a set of vegetation found in southern Africa.

      I felt this too when I was growing up in Johannesburg – without a landscape. I recall sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car watching fires burn across the winter veld, casting palls of smoke across the highways. I longed for green. I remember dreaming of planting lawns over the mine dumps and along the so-called green belts. The same fires would also burn the open grass veld next to our home, and the white men who owned homes in the suburb would beat the fire with sacks while my mother (and myself, when I had grown older) would spray water on the roof and lawns. Mostly, catastrophe was averted, but sometimes the fire would nick the lawn from over the precast concrete walls, scarring it black.

      The lawn, consistently and perfectly mown, was a great joy to my father but also a cause for concern. On weekdays the gardeners – Laxton, after him Sam, then Benjamin and Hanock – would mow, fertilise, water, seed, spread compost and repair broken sprinklers. On weekends my shirtless father would mow his lawn. With the help of apartheid, my father’s family, who at the time of the Great Depression had been bywoners (white Afrikaans tenant farmers, displaced from their own property, often associated with ‘poor whites’), were lifted from penury and had taken on, with great commitment, the struggle to become ‘good whites’ (Teppo 2004). Among a number of other banal domestic practices that allowed them to lay claim to a viable white location, the lawn – its propagation, design, maintenance, appreciation and use – provided a territory and a backdrop for their (mis)adventures in white heteropatriarchy.

      My mother, who during periods of my father’s absence energetically fulfilled his lawn duties, was Rhodesian, as were her parents. They too were committed lawn subjects, at home and on the sports field. Internationally successful sportsmen and women, they excelled in field hockey and lawn bowls. Indeed, I have many childhood memories of my grandparents, decked out all in white and padding softly on lettuce-green turf.

      The banal brutality of these kinds of scenes has not been lost on careful artistic and academic observers.

       The lawn in theory

      Internationally, from the late 1990s onwards, critics have provided thorough treatments of the lawn phenomenon. The bulk of the research focuses on the United States, with some research from the United Kingdom and ex-British colonies.¹ These studies put the lawn on the research agenda and opened up lines of inquiry into the lawn as a botanical, cultural, political and aesthetic object of analysis. The varied and interdisciplinary approaches have drawn on methods from environmental history, urban political economy, cultural history, urban studies, sociology and visual studies, producing a rich and provocative literature. These studies have done the hard work of tracing the histories of technological developments such as the invention and global spread of the lawnmower and the introduction and mass uptake of pesticides and fertilisers. They have asked questions about the meaning of the lawn; about the cultural values encoded in it; about how and what it signifies. Further, they have explored the lawn as a representational domain embodied in fine art, design, landscape architecture, architectural plans, advertising, ephemera, legal proceedings, poetry and so on. Some writers have also advanced a critique of the lawn from a Marxist standpoint, showing convincingly how environmentally destructive lawn economies structure supposedly personal landscape preferences. Notably, the discipline of political ecology has shown how lawns are part of a cyborg world – part natural/part social, part technical/part cultural – where non-humans play active roles in socio-natural processes. Finally, many studies have offered spirited political alternatives to the hegemony of the lawn while also acknowledging the powerful hold the lawn discourse exercises over the possibilities for speaking and acting against the lawn.²

      As