Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
lawn appears to be a convincing ‘reproduction’ and completed ‘illusion’, except that, as Froude notes later in the passage, instead of ‘our delicate grass there is buffalo-grass, whose coarse fibre no care in mow’ing [sic] can conceal’ (quoted in Macinnis 2009: 93). Bhabha’s conception of mimicry as resemblance containing ‘both mockery and a certain menace’ (1994: 86) can help to explain why Buchan would have described the landscape’s imperfections as ‘comical’, and why Eliovson would worry that a badly kept lawn would be a ‘mockery’ (1968: 113). The lawn ‘reproduced in another hemisphere’ will be ‘a “blurred copy” … that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery, since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 125). This failure to fully approximate is unsettling because it ‘locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of the colonized’. The colonial lawn cannot be complete; it is a ‘resemblance which dogs one’, suggesting a ‘house’, suggesting a ‘gleam of water’, suggesting a ‘grey wall’ and enclosing a property to which you ‘are always coming … and never arriving’ (Buchan 1903: 151).
Unkind soil
‘Botany at the point of political unification of South Africa was an activity for people who had plenty of leisure time and high-society connections’ (Anker 2001: 54). Dorothea Fairbridge was one such well-connected Cape lady. The ‘romantic and charismatic doyen of South African Englishness’ (Dubow 2006: 187), she was one of the leading members of the so-called ‘Closer Union’ loyalists, ‘a group of architects, artists, writers, historians, archivists and photographers, all of whom were dedicated to the idea of a united South Africa’ (Merrington 1995: 653) and who ‘would encourage imperial links, along with a conciliatory sense of national heritage’ (Merrington 1999: 230). Fairbridge was closely connected to Lord Milner – with whom she is rumoured to have had an affair (Dick 2005: 6) – and Lady Florence Phillips, who was her friend and patron. Florence Phillips, the wife of Randlord Sir Lionel Phillips, a prominent social and cultural figure in the country, was a co-founder of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. As well as supporting Fairbridge’s writing, Lady Phillips also commissioned and sponsored the lumbering and weighty Flora of South Africa by Rudolf Marloth (1913–32). She also, after 1910, funded The State, a pro-Union periodical, which was orientated towards the ‘construction of a new ameliorative South African identity’ (Merrington 1995: 654) and included articles on design by Fairbridge and Herbert Baker and other friends.
Fairbridge’s coterie successfully lobbied for the founding of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden and the Botanical Society in the Cape, a major coup in the ongoing battle between the Cape botanists and the officially sanctioned Pretoria Herbarium (Carruthers 2011: 259; Dubow 2006). In addition to being a founding member of the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, whose subtitle ‘Daughters of the Empire’ left little doubt about their political allegiances (Dick 2005: 6), she also was a founder of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Michaelis Art Collection (Merrington 1995). Fairbridge was a well-regarded writer. She penned five novels, the controversial A History of South Africa (published in 1918), a number of heritage-related and botanical publications, travelogues, essays, short stories and articles.
Gardens of South Africa was published in 1924 and emerged during what Foster calls the ‘ “heyday of landscape”, a time when the discursive use of landscape as a prop of imaginary identity was most intense in South Africa’ (2005: 302). The book is a tangle of political philosophy, race theory, botany, name dropping, garden history and practical garden advice: House & Leisure magazine meets Thomas Malthus. There are many uncomfortable moments in the text, including a discussion on the virtues of kikuyu grass, which was then new in the Transvaal (Fairbridge 1924: 34), alongside zealous imperial, and racist, exhortations like ‘[the] gardens that grow peacefully on the lands that were once the Black Man’s and may be the Black Man’s again if the White Folk of South Africa let themselves forget the necessity for standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to hold the land for Civilisation’ (37). It is unfortunate, according to some (Merrington 1995; Wylie 2011), though not at all surprising, that Fairbridge’s writing has remained unfashionable after apartheid and also under-theorised. The passage below is taken from an anecdote on ‘mine gardens’ of the Reef, which for Fairbridge ‘present a different problem’:
They are set in surroundings which are sometimes frankly ugly and always bare and uncompromising. Yet, note what love can do. In a locality that seems made of mining gear, dust … you may open a gate and pass into little gardens with emerald lawns … little gardens upon which some woman has spent herself in the passionate love of loveliness and a craving for beauty in a world of unredeemed utilitarianism … Think of the courage of it and the rare quality of soul … content to feel that she has redeemed thirteen corners of the Reef from ugliness … but the soil of the mines is poor and thin, this must first be supplemented by good earth brought from a more kindly area. (1924: 34)
The Reef is ‘frankly ugly’ for two reasons. The first is Fairbridge’s dislike of the industrial aesthetic of the Reef and the scars upon the landscape. The criticism of capitalist aesthetics is in keeping with the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement exemplified in John Ruskin’s 1862 opposition to industrialisation and capitalism in Unto This Last. The second is because the Reef environment itself, apart from being scarred and damaged, was at odds with Cape-based Fairbridge’s national landscape and garden picture. For her New-Imperial eyes, the lawn trope offered hope for articulating one possible commonality of landscape across the nation, but also great frustration. Because of the Reef’s geographic and climatic conditions, especially the lack of winter rainfall and winter frost, the ‘vivid green lawns … turn golden and the gardens compose themselves to sleep’ (Fairbridge 1924: 34). It was in this context that Fairbridge was involved with Pole Evans, the head of Botany and Plant Pathology in the Department of Agriculture, who managed the planting of kikuyu grass for the lawns at the Union Buildings (Fairbridge 1924: 36; Stapf 1921: 88).
The Reef is depicted as ugly, bare, uncompromising, thin-soiled and the woman’s little garden (or more correctly her gardening) is presented as beautiful, the redemption of this dusty utilitarian life. In Fairbridge, goodness and beauty are knotted together in notions like ‘good earth’, gardening as an act of ‘redemption’, and the idea that good soil and good grass can, and should, be brought from somewhere else. The prayerful acts of gardening, even the subtle mirroring of ‘soil’ and ‘soul’, have their origins in the primogenial gardening texts of medieval Dominican bishop Albertus Magnus. In his forty-volume encyclopaedic account of the vita occulta or the ‘hidden life’ of plants, Magnus argues:
Nothing refreshes the sight so much as fine short grass. One must clear the space destined for a pleasure garden of all roots, and this can hardly be achieved unless the roots are dug out, the surface levelled, as much as possible, and boiling water is poured over the surface, so that the remaining roots and seeds which lie in the ground are destroyed and cannot germinate … The ground must then be covered with turves cut from good [meadow] grass, and beaten down with wooden mallets, and stamped down well with the feet until they are hardly able to be seen. Then little by little the grass pushes through like fine hair, and covers the surface like a fine cloth. (quoted in Thacker 1985: 84)
The notion that the lawn refreshes the ‘sight’, or the ‘eye’ in Petrus de Crescentiis’s later transcription (1305), or the ‘eyes’ in the earlier De claustro animae (of 1172) by Hugues de Fouilloy – ‘the green lawn of the cloister garden refreshes the eyes of the beholder and recalls to their minds … the future life’ (quoted in MacDougall 1986: 51) – recurs in a number of other places. Speaking about the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, John Merriman, former premier of the Cape Colony, said: ‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’ (quoted in Carruthers 2011: 264).
The goodness and beauty of the lawn is not, however, value free. In The Theory of Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen writes that while lawn has ‘sensuous beauty … to the eye of nearly all races and classes … it is, perhaps, unquestionably more beautiful to the eye of the dolichoblond