Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane

      Plate 1: David Goldblatt, Saturday afternoon: bowls on the East Rand Proprietary Mines green. June 1980. From the series ‘In Boksburg’ (1982), Goldblatt’s photograph of elderly white ladies on the bowling green exemplifies both the photographer’s interests in ‘everyday’ life under apartheid and the seemingly genteel culture of the lawn. (Photograph by David Goldblatt. © David Goldblatt, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.)

      Plate 2: Moses Tladi, The House in Kensington B. Tladi’s painting of his home, from which he was evicted in 1956 under the forced removals, is a counterpoint to his grander paintings of ‘Lokshoek’ in Parktown, which depict the garden he worked for Herbert Read. (Image reproduced from The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi by Angela Read Lloyd [Publishing Print Matters, 2009]. Courtesy of Mmapula Tladi-Small and Print Matters.)

      Plate 3: Anton Kannemeyer, Splendid Dwelling, 2012. A leitmotif in Kannemeyer’s work, the lawn is depicted strikingly as red dashes on a lurid green background. This unsettling visual treatment is suggestive of his scepticism towards the polite conformity of the suburbs. (© Anton Kannemeyer, courtesy of the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.)

      Plate 4: Brett Murray, The Renaissance Man Tending His Land, 2008. In the artist’s self-portrait, Murray presents himself in ironic fashion as the landed gentry. Wearing a powdered peruke and in blackface, the shirtless gardener mocks the leisurely presentation of whitely gardening. (Image courtesy of Brett Murray. Photograph: Sean Wilson.)

      Plate 5: David Goldblatt, Saturday Afternoon in Sunward Park. 1979. The heroic, muscular gardener that Goldblatt captured mowing his lawn in Boksburg is an archetype of the respectable white suburbanite performing his weekend duty. Mowing here is not ‘work’; it is a claim of ownership through leisure. (Photograph by David Goldblatt. © David Goldblatt, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.)

      Plate 6: David Goldblatt, Miriam Mazibuko waters the garden of her RDP house for which she waited eight years. It consists of one room. Her four children live with her in-laws. Extension 8, Far East Alexandra Township. 12 September 2006. Water is essential to the lawn, a source of stress for many South African gardeners. (Photograph by David Goldblatt. © David Goldblatt, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.)

      Plate 7: W. A. Eden, Photomontage of Blenheim, 1935. The montage shows a proposed design for a high-rise apartment block superimposed on top of Blenheim Palace with its iconic eighteenth-century landscape gardens. The modern lawn is the location for revolutionary housing. (Image from Architectural Review, March 1935. Courtesy of EMAP.)

      Plate 8: Connell et al., Native Township General Site Layout, 1938. The bold plan by a group of Wits students for a high-rise ‘Native Township for 20 000 Inhabitants’ echoed Le Corbusier and marked the end of a debate in South Africa about the viability of apartment housing for black urbanites. (Courtesy of the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand.)

      Plate 9: D. M. Calderwood, NE 51/9, 1953. Often referred to as the ‘matchbox’ house, the NE 51/9 (Non-European, version 9 of 1951) was devised through studies of existing low-cost houses as well as architectural and scientific experimentation, and became ubiquitous during and after apartheid. (From D. M. Calderwood,