The grass isn’t always greener, it’s brown in highveld winters

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For the first few years of my life my parents and I lived with my grandparents on a Pretoria property with an expansive, plush lawn next to a (habitually dry) spruit. 

Some of my fondest childhood memories are linked to that green lawn in the shade of tall trees. Growing up as a white, middle-class child in the mid-1990s I had the luxury of a lawn without having to think about how it got there or who sustained its colour and composition. 

It was not until we moved a few years later that I realised my parents had other plans for our new backyard: a water-conscious “garden” full of heavy souvenirs collected during their travels — rocks in every shape, size, and colour imaginable. Eight-year-old me was thoroughly frustrated with my mother’s odd choice of sharp, inhospitable, or simply, dull décor.

Now, 30 years on, I can see myself making the exact same choice as my mother. Apart from a few houseplants that I’m trying to keep alive, I wouldn’t ever want to burden myself with the anxious drama that crops up with keeping a living lawn.

Keeping lawn

A lawn is something that must be actively made and actively kept, both unfolding processes that require labour. Plenty of it. In South Africa, racial and economic inequality dictates who does this work, and why. 

Social relations determine what person of what gender, age, and race, for what reward, wearing what, on which day of the week and with what equipment, is responsible for a snazzy lawn. (Hint: there are no wrong answers. There are reasons for the diverse examples you are thinking of.) Many forms of work — be it a leisurely weekend hobby for one or a strenuous and tough job for another — composes the lawn’s foundation.

And this work poses its fair share of challenges. It is a common (yet ignored or actively protested against) fact that most lawns are not remotely green in winter. The lawn’s seasonal clock is perhaps most prominent in the South African highveld and its dusty, dry, cold winters. 

This seasonality, as highlighted in one of the “brownest” landscapes imaginable, pushes the naturalness associated with the lawn to its utmost limits. Moreover, routine care must be taken to water and mow at the correct time to optimise growth stimulation. Keeping a lawn — especially in the middle of a dry winter — can “at best, only ever be a temporary victory”, wrote Jonathan Cane in Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld. Apart from commitment and labour, keeping the lawn green out of season also requires ample amounts of water.

This is commonly because the most popular grass used for lawn-making in South Africa, kikuyu (Cenchrus clandestinus), is not indigenous. Kikuyu grass can be traced back to the highland regions of East Africa. About a century ago samples from the vicinity of Lake Naivasha in the East Africa Protectorate were sent to Pretoria and on to London for propagation, according to Cane. 

Where does the idea of ideal grass come from

Ideas about what grass should look like and how it must be kept also come from somewhere else: the lawn as natural, beautiful, and tranquil has its roots in British empiricism. Since its early days, the well-kept lawn had the role of instilling feelings of order and civility. This, in classic modernist fashion, could only be achieved if the lawn was posed against something. Nowhere as in “wild Africa” was this easier to establish: the wilderness of the veld and the wild animals roaming in it had to be kept out. How? By the bounded, neatly trimmed lawn that separated the domestic from the wild. 

But modernism’s anxious boundaries are malleable: without constant work they shift and decay. The South African highveld foregrounds grass as unruly and disruptive, uprooting the colonial ideal of the landscape as gentle and timeless. Anxiety rises as the demarcated lawn — the boundary between here and there — fails to be natural. Alongside many other facets of life in South Africa, something as seemingly innocent as grass forms part of a violent, discriminatory, exclusionary lineage. Rebelling against confined ideals of the lawn might also provide freedom to interrogate the objectives of societal systems so dependent on borders — patriarchy, capitalism, racism, heteronormativity.

The lawn assumes someone’s responsibility and someone’s ownership. Its grass is needy; it consumes valuable water, valuable time, valuable resources, valuable labour, and valuable knowledge. It demands maintenance through a flurry of cyclical activities such as mowing, weeding, composting, fertilising, and watering. It requires tools and trinkets, from lawnmowers to weed eaters, to compost and sprinkler systems, to fertilisers and chemical pesticides, to storage sheds for tools, to birdbaths, colourful garden gnomes and concrete meerkats (but only if you’re into that sort of thing). 

Oh, and a constant flow of water, did I mention that? It is not uncommon for the discourse on grass in South Africa to push the urgent concern of water availability to the periphery and foreground routines and tips (such as mowing and, obviously, pressing questions like how to choose the best lawn mower). 

Not talking about water means it’s not a problem, right? Wrong. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but water is essential to the keeping of a lawn. Ironically, South African residents are no strangers to water crises. Several cities and towns have faced, are facing or are going to face a Day Zero water shortage. Yet, South Africa’s per capita water consumption is substantially higher than the global average of 173 litres per person daily; here it is 234 litres of water per person daily. And this is assuming that this usage is equally spread out among the country’s citizens. Okay, swirling back to the lawn. 

What do we gain when we’ve achieved something so close to impossible as keeping a lawn green in the middle of a drought? Frankly, a whole lot of anxious uneasiness. Despite our best efforts, the lawn is a messy oscillation between green and brown depending on the calendar date, a space that can both stagnate and grow, soothe and scratch. Lawns in South Africa — as in other dry parts around the world — were never meant to be. Regardless of everything, the lawn will always fail (sorry to break it to you). I’m saying this so that I may spare you the anxiety associated with the keeping of a lawn. Trust me, you’ll see that your water bill — and the planet for that matter — agrees with me.

PS: Give interdisciplinary art historian Cane’s a read. You’ll never look at grass in the same way again.