Estate Living Magazine Design for living - Issue 42 June 2019 | Page 46

C O M M U N I T Y
L I V I N G
“I believe a leaf of grass is
no less than the journey-
work of the stars.”
Walt Whitman
The ubiquitous urban lawn.
Where did it come from?
Do you really need one?
And what do you choose if you do?
In the bad old days they used to say you should never interfere with
a South African’s lawn – or their braai. And while that’s probably still
true for the braai, is it really still true for the lawn? Today’s gardens, though, are tiny compared to those park-like old
properties, but we’re still trying to emulate them – usually with a
perfectly mowed lawn as our point of departure. But should we?
Students of history will tell you that many of today’s urban gardens
are modelled on the ‘English Landscape’ style – the sweeping vistas,
the romanticised lakes, the rolling lawns tumbling down to stylised
forest glens, the mixed herbaceous borders – that surrounded the
grand country houses of the British Isles in the 18th, 19th and early
20th centuries. Poisonous green deserts
They’ll tell you, too, that these gardens were designed to imitate
nature (but in a much more organised way, of course), and that they
represented a rebellion against the strictly formal and symmetrical
arrangements beloved of earlier centuries (or, more likely, beloved
of the French with their Versailles-style geometry).
It’s never going to be possible to resolve the arguments for and
against lawns by sticking to questions of aesthetics, because there’ll
always be people who love how they look, as much as there’ll be
those (admittedly not yet many) who think they’re a blight.
But when you consider the damage that lawns – and their
management – do to the environment, well, that’s a whole ’nother
story.
With hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of hectares of lawn
under cultivation around the world, grass is probably the most
wasteful crop known to humankind. It doesn’t do much, but it