“The garden of love's decay”: the suburban garden as eco-poetic space in South Africa

Abstract

Alan Mabin recently noted that “Suburbs have been a silent presence in the widely disseminated ‘models’ of the apartheid city. [H]ow the suburbs happened is assumed rather than understood.” Many suburbs, including the famously well-treed northern suburbs of Johannesburg and, indeed, the historically white suburbs of Grahamstown, do not fit the American or Australian stereotype; their uses and meanings prove to be extremely patchy and variable in practice. Susan Parnell and Mabin have thus been arguing for a break away from what they perceive as methods “bound by racial fetishism” that have obscured many dimensions of urbanisation from view. The ecology of the small garden offers one such break. Increasingly, urbanisation studies are environmental or ecological in their approach, yet even here the garden for a long time has scarcely featured. This article makes a move towards filling that gap. Against the background of urbanisation studies both in South Africa and elsewhere, outlining the multi-layered cultural histories of the suburban garden, the article focuses on the poetry of Don Maclennan from a broadly ecocritical perspective. Such literatures, it is suggested, provide crucial insights into the phenomenological meanings of gardens at the individual emotional level.

Keywords:

• South African poetry
• ecocriticism
• suburban gardens
• urbanisation studies
• Don Maclennan