The Wind Blows & The Grass Grows

2024
Essay

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: — “Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.

Excerpt from ‘The Glory of the Garden’, 1911
- Rudyard Kipling

During a recent trip that I took back to the UK in December to revisit my childhood home, I spotted a feature of our family’s old front garden, in St. Pauls Walden, Hertfordshire, that ought to be alien to the English countryside: two gigantic bushes of pampas grass (Fig. 1). These exotic-looking plants are hard to miss in this setting. Yet, as a young child, they appeared wholly part of the natural landscape I was encountering each day on various walks and excursions in the fields surrounding our farmhouse. Although I remember thinking it was a ‘posh’ kind of plant, it never crossed my mind that it came from anywhere but the same place in which I found it. Pampas grass appeared as native to England as myself.

Whatever that means.

Now, this isn’t to say that it didn’t stand out. In fact, from my limited vantage point as a child (and even now, come to think of it), the pampas grass in our garden was an absolute monster. It dwarfed every living thing in its vicinity, aside from the laburnum and conifer trees nearby. Furthermore, the grass created a kind of aquatic, squid-like silhouette, making it seem otherworldly through my eyes. The countless leaves from its two bushes ballooned out on all sides from an unseen core that I was ever curious to investigate, somewhat resembling those impractically large Victorian-era dresses that are supported by hidden wireframes, only broken by the occasional tentacle-like leaf. Its feathery flowers, perched atop stiff and upright stalky stems, had the appearance of looking down at me from above, as posh people tend to look down irreverently upon those deemed ‘below them’ in class or stature. In this way, the grass had not only a mysterious appeal but also an aura of respectability. It’s no coincidence that the owners of the farmhouse from whom my parents rented, the ones who planted the pampas grass there in the first place, had a similarly regal vibe. They are, as I quickly discovered as a child, direct relatives of the royal family. Even at such a young age, the connection between stately landowners and stately grass became apparent to me. After all, only fancy plants would be selected by fancy people to grow in a fancy place, right? This space invader of a grass, much like our royal-blooded landlords, was imbued with status.

But despite my impressions as a child, pampas grass is not native to England – it’s not even from the same hemisphere. Pampas grass originates from South America. It is commonly found in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and, most notably, the Pampas region of southern Argentina; la Pampa, which is synonymous with ‘plains’ owing to the flatness of this vast expanse of grasslands connecting the Gran Chaco in the north, the Atlantic Ocean in the east, Patagonia in the south, and the Andes in the west. (Darke, 2007, p. 280)

Pampas grass is thoroughly adapted to survive in these dry, grassy environments. It withstands droughts, a frequent occurrence in the Pampas, thanks to its long and complicated root system that burrows deep beneath the surface of the soil to source as much water as possible. So robust are its underground ventricles that pampas grass not only survives but benefits from fire – another frequent natural occurrence in the Pampas region. Like a phoenix, the grass grows back bigger and stronger from the ashes each time after a fire cycle by taking the space and resources once occupied by its less hardy plant neighbours. Up top, the prized flowers of pampas grass that so famously create its stately presence consist of thousands of seeds attached to thin hairs. They become dispersed through wind, allowing the grass to multiply with remarkable success in the Pampas as a result of both the flatness of the region and the intensity of the winds that are created there - a cyclical and harmonious relationship formed throughout millions of years following South America’s separation from Africa. (Stubbins, 2023, p. 1)

The existence of this grass in the front garden of an Elizabethan farmhouse in Hertfordshire therefore begs the question, how did it get there? Because, speaking only to the ecology of pampas grass here, it evolved to survive in a climate altogether different from rainy, cold, and often miserable England, which is rarely associated with drought thanks to the torrents of showers and storms that these islands receive from the Atlantic Ocean. The specification of pampas grass as non-native to the UK, and therefore as an alien species, thus calls into question how terms like ‘alien’ and ‘native’ complicate culturally produced notions of statehood in the first place. After all, pampas grass does grow in the British Isles currently and is undoubtedly integrated into British culture at multiple levels. So, what does the popularity of pampas grass in the UK today reveal about British identity and how it is constructed?

What does it mask?

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As relevant a place as any to begin unravelling the journey of pampas grass from Argentina to the UK is at Kew Gardens. In 1813, the Prussian naturalist Friedrich Sello (later Sellow) arrived in Montevideo on an all-expenses-paid expedition in South America funded by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and its numerous lordly benefactors. In the years following, Sellow would encounter pampas grass and ship it off to London.

Sellow was born in Potsdam and was the son of one of the head gardeners to the Prussian royals at the Sanssouci Palace Gardens. (Krausch, 2002, p. 73) He began his training at the Botanical Gardens in Berlin and, upon the advice of Alexander von Humboldt, then left to continue his education in Paris. Before long, however, the ensuing Napoleonic wars on the continent cut Sellow’s stay in France short, prompting him to travel to London and eventually to his first meeting with the naturalists at Kew. Sellow subsequently spent the rest of his life in South America. He died abruptly in 1831 aged just 42 when his canoe capsized whilst he was travelling down the Rio Doce and caused him to drown. But although Sellow never returned to Europe himself, he made sure to ship a lot of South America over there (at least 12,500 plants, 5,457 birds, 110,000 insects, 263 mammals, and 2,000 geological samples were sent to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin alone). He was an insatiable explorer and every bit the collections-based naturalist that so aptly describes European ‘men of science’ during the 18th and 19th centuries. Sellow embarked upon countless expeditions in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, each time sending shipment after shipment of his finds to herbariums, botanical gardens, and societies for natural science in Europe to fill their greenhouses and museum halls – first to Kew, to pay off the affluent men and institutions that funded his initial voyage, and then predominantly to the Botanical Gardens and Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. (Zischler et al, 2013, p 221-229)

The earliest sample of pampas grass collected by Sellow that I could find in the Kew archives is recorded as 1814-31 (Fig. 2), indicating only this seventeen-year window within which Sellow first began shipping the grass to London. Neither the date of Sellow’s initial encounter with pampas grass in South America nor any field notes elaborating upon his study of the grass became apparent from my research. And in this respect, I was a little disheartened. Owing to half of the botanical name for pampas grass, Cortaderia selloana, relating to its European ‘founder’, I had expected more documentation of the grass to appear in the accounts of Sellow and his legacy. I think that I was hoping to discover how he described the grass, what his impressions of it were, and why he felt compelled to collect it to better understand his motives. But instead, all I’ve found are small, anecdotal passages offering little to suggest the circumstances under which Sellow came across pampas grass, or what he thought of it. Indeed, inventory lists, archival records, and even Sellow’s hand-written diaries held at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin are oddly lacking in commentary on pampas grass and its convergence with the naturalists from Europe. Was pampas grass simply not that interesting to Sellow and his fellow botanical explorers? Did his other plant, animal, and mineral finds, with more obvious medicinal or practical uses at the time, take his attention?

What does it say about contemporary European associations with pampas grass that its namesake made no defining mention of it?

After all, pampas grass has seriously taken root in Europe. During the same trip back to the UK in December, I was amazed by how often I noticed the erect, pale, fluffy towers of pampas grass breach the tops of boundary fences and walls as I drove through Bristol, London, and Wales. It started to become clear to me on this trip that my childhood home is by no means unique in hosting pampas grass directly upon a territorial border. As I have since learned, this is a common strategy for homeowners in the UK; to plant pampas grass at the outermost limits of their garden, and in doing so indicate for all in its presence a kind of grassy, feathery frontier separating private garden from public road. In this way, pampas grass in the UK can be seen to not only mark but actually become a border, simultaneously separating and demarcating space. And to my surprise, I’ve even found pampas grass planted similarly in Berlin, although arguably less so than in the UK. I see it here growing in front of those colossal business parks along the wide roads that connect residential parts of this city (Fig. 3).

It is perplexing then to find no special linkage, except in name, to Sellow, who evidently recognised value in the grass when he encountered it in South America in the early 1800s, studied it, codified it, gave it a taxonomy, named it, and shipped it off to Europe. (Schiebinger, 2004, p. 5) But then, Sellow had nothing to do with the popularity that developed for pampas grass in the years following his death. And perhaps Sellow’s only part in the journey of pampas grass from Argentina to the UK is that he introduced it to the naturalists at Kew. In fact, it wasn’t until after Sellow passed away that the grass was named for him. It had previously been given the name Gynerium argenteum. The celebrity-like hype that pampas grass garnered from the mid-19th century onwards during which time it was heralded as the ‘queen of ornamental grasses’ in numerous newspaper articles and advertisements, was the labour of horticulturalists, seed merchants, garden directors, and nursery owners all wishing to profit from its sale, not the army of naturalists who studied it for state-sponsored scientific purposes. (Oakes, 1990, p. 37)

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Although pampas grass does seem to serve as a kind of natural barrier in many front gardens in the UK today, the success of pampas grass in this country is fundamentally born from its value as a beautiful plant, not as a useful plant. (Oakes, 1990, p. 29) (Liendo et al, 2023, p. 230) This is evident from the repetitive descriptions of pampas grass in terms such as ‘spectacular’, ‘magnificent’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘stately’, and ‘exotic’ in newspaper articles I found going back at least as far as 1852. (The Illustrated London News, 1852, p. 28) Pampas grass has had an enviable PR campaign to highlight its aesthetic characteristics, I must say. Meanwhile, little is written about the use factor of pampas grass, except as a means to make money. (Holder, 1902, pp. 400-401)

Still, the acclaimed beauty of pampas grass does not in and of itself account for the mechanics that enabled it to be collected in the first place. Its beauty alone does not speak to its integration into British gardens and British culture. Needless to say, pampas grass did not accidentally arrive in the UK. Its journey to Kew Gardens must be seen within the context of the British Empire, and so it is necessary to travel down the timeline a little further.

Spain established Argentina as a ‘permanent colony’ in 1580. (Tower, 1918) It remained so, with unimaginable and likely still untold violence wrought upon the disparate indigenous peoples and tribes who lived there by the Spanish conquistadors and Jesuit missionaries, until the Argentinian Declaration of Independence in 1816. (Ficek, 2019) (Jones, 1986) (Scobie, 2014) And though never an official British colony, by which I mean that the British had no direct, lawful or political say over policy, Argentina was a source of significant British commercial interests whilst it was under Spanish colonial rule, leading scholars of the 20th century to list Argentina amongst Britain’s many ‘informal empires’. (Ferns, 1953) Indeed, British trade was taking place in Argentina long before the country gained its independence from Spain, and continued long after. (Gallagher et al, 1953) (Hopkins, 1994, p. 484). The expansive railway network, for example, connecting rural locations to the main cities was a British project, and was funded by British companies, to better transport raw materials like cow hides and cereals like wheat out of Argentina. (Penaloza, 2008) There was even a failed military take-over of Buenos Aires by the British combined military forces in 1806, ten years before Argentinian independence was secured from Spain. (Ferns, 1950, p.1) The commander of the British attack, Commodore Home Popham, who had been shown false accounts before the violence that the people of Buenos Aires desired liberation by the British, was shocked at how passionately its inhabitants, including enslaved African men, fought them off. (Murray, 1960, p.423)

The British were also instrumental in the annexation of lands in South America. In 1828, pressure from the British led to the establishment of Uruguay as a buffer state to maintain a profitable climate for British commercial activity in the region. (Taylor, 1982, p. 22) Four years later, the Argentinian flag was toppled in the Malvinas Islands, better known in the UK as the Falklands, when the Royal Marines annexed the islands from Argentina to set up a permanent British naval base. Over a century later, in 1982, at least in part to distract attention from one of many economic crises unfolding in Argentina, Argentinian troops were deployed to take back the Malvinas from British control. This was followed by a monumental military response from the British armed forces under the direction of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government, which ultimately proved disastrous for Argentina. One of the starkest media images from the Falklands War was the cover of Newsweek Magazine on the 19th of April, 1982, showing HMS Hermes, a British aircraft carrier, ploughing through the waves of the Atlantic Ocean on route to the Malvinas Islands with the words ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ layered on top. And indeed, the empire did strike back. Thousands of lives were lost in the process and Argentina’s economy took an even further blow through the costs incurred by the war. When asked by the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in 2013, whether the UK would finally relinquish territorial claim to the Malvinas, Prime Minister David Cameron refused, responding that so long as the people living there wished to remain a British protectorate, Britain would stay. (de Kirchner, 2013) (Wintour, 2012) It is one of the more obvious and painful legacies of Britain’s expansionist past in Argentina.

Integral to the British Empire was also the process of collecting, naming, and utilising plants. (Mastnak et al, 2014) And just as institutions such as the British Museum were integrated into the mechanisms of the British Empire through close collaboration with the British army, so was Kew Gardens integrated through collaboration with the navy. Kew’s first director, Joseph Banks, began in 1768 to send seeds to Kew whilst he was aboard James Cook’s voyage to the South Seas. (Royal Botanic Garden Kew, n.d.) Later, in 1788, over 1,000 species of breadfruit were collected in Tahiti under orders from Kew, for which the British navy purchased the infamous and later mutinied merchant ship the HMS Bounty. In 1841, just over a decade after the British established its naval base on the Malvinas Islands, Joseph Hooker transported plants from the islands to Kew in glazed Wardian cases, an innovation developed in the 19th century to keep plants alive on long sea and land voyages. Today, one hundred and fifteen unique records from the Malvinas are kept in the Kew Gardens Millennium Seed Bank, including a close relative of pampas grass that is native to the islands, Cortaderia egmontiana. (Royal Botanic Garden Kew, n.d.) Botanical exploration, trade, the development of infrastructure to streamline the transportation of goods, the establishment of museums and botanical gardens to store valuable finds, coups, invasions, annexations, and other forms of military action to secure continued extraction by force, and not forgetting political pressure and the signing of contracts and agreements behind closed doors are all spokes of the same wheel, making pampas grass a product of the great British Imperial machine, whether it is understood as ‘informal’ or otherwise in the case of Argentina.

Consequently, the journey of this grass from the Pampas to Hertfordshire speaks not only to botanical exploration but to the broader legacy of the British Empire. It is a legacy made evident by the existence of a British protectorate in the Malvinas Islands to this day and also by the many crises that have befallen the Argentinian economy since the country was first carved up by European colonial powers centuries ago – Javier Milei’s ‘shock therapy’ strategy being just the latest instalment in a series of desperate attempts to kick start the economy and spur foreign investment once more. Britain’s legacy in Argentina can be seen as a record of this extraction, and pampas grass as just one product. Furthermore, the popularity of pampas grass in the UK today, to the extent to which it is associated with beauty and not empire, is indicative of how masked this extractive imperial history has become. I can speak to this from experience, as a British man educated through the British school system having never been taught one thing about our imperial history.

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The research I’ve conducted over the past months to retrace pampas grass to its geographical origins and better understand it as an indicator of the legacy of British Imperialism has been driven by my desire to address my relationship with the UK and any notions I have of being native. It is a topic I find hard to ignore at present, both concerning my current immigration status in Germany and my being a Briton in the post-BREXIT years when so many immigrants to the UK have recently been forced to leave. In some ways, I do feel British. But it’s an awkward feeling to quantify and I feel equally as entitled to the feeling of belonging to the country in which I was born as I am embarrassed to vocalise it. The aspects of British culture that I miss are fleeting, I have to admit, and the British idiosyncrasies that I find endearing – like over-apologising, talking about the weather, and generally being a bit chatty – are quickly overshadowed by the woeful lack of responsibility that British politicians and heads of state take for the lasting effects of the British Empire upon countries such as Argentina. My perception, at least, is that Britons today also fail to adequately acknowledge the degree to which immigrants to the UK have influenced and enriched British culture. The Windrush Scandal of 2018 is just one example of this failure and can be seen as indicative of an ongoing lack of awareness in this country of our own imperial and colonial history. (BBC, 2023)

What most anchors my British identity is my connection with the Hertfordshire countryside that I grew up in – the closest thing I have to an ancestral home. Muddy fields, dead oaks, potholes, and crows. Crumbling farmhouses with wonky chimney brick bits, skinny roads that can barely hold a single car, steep hedge walls like cliffs on either side. Tractor tyre mountains. Electric fences. Picking mushrooms. Nettle soup. Secret scratchy hiding places where nobody would ever think to look. This is the place that raised me – the place that held me from my first days until I was eleven years old. If I’m honest, the reason that these aspects of my upbringing stir up the most connection with being British for me is that they don’t register as being political and thus show no evidence of Britain’s ugly imperial past. I can say that I’ve felt a sense of pride when telling people that I grew up in the countryside and not London precisely because this environment is so natural and apolitical (in my mind). However, my research into pampas grass has proven that even grass can occupy a political realm. This landscape that I romanticise is far from politically neutral, it turns out, nor safe from critique.

My inclusion of Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Glory of the Garden at the beginning of this essay is a nod to this. The first lines of the poem make the conflation of nation and nature clear: “Our England is a garden”. And if England can be understood as a garden, then pampas grass is surely a constituent. The pampas grass growing in the garden of my childhood home was a feature of the same countryside that moors my British identity, and undoubtedly part of what makes me feel British because, as a child, I perceived pampas grass as being native to England.

Who am I to say that it isn’t?

After all, it was there before I was.

The process of researching pampas grass has also made me question how being or becoming native is achieved. And because I’ve been thinking about plants as well as myself within this context, it has been illuminating to compare the concept of ‘native’ between plant and human realms. To be clear, being native to the UK is not necessarily something that I seek to strengthen or diminish through this exercise. However, after eight years of living in Germany (which is a quarter of my life), I have noticed that I already feel less like a product of the UK. Is it therefore possible that I can lose my claim to being native just because I feel it less so? I definitely wouldn’t say that I feel German, either. Nor do I particularly want to be. The concept of nationhood simply feels too broad for my liking. But can anyone claim to become native? Or is being native to a place a title humans earn only by being born in that particular place? In this case, I can only claim to be native to the UK and nowhere else. Pampas grass, conversely, under this definition, is native to Argentina and not the UK, despite the reality that it grows all over these islands. But hang on, this definition gets even shakier because pampas grass grows across several national borders in South America – not only in Argentina but also Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay – making it native to an entire continent.

Yet, perhaps being native also requires acceptance within a culture to the degree to which someone or something is integrated, in which case it is hard to deny pampas grass the title of being native to the UK. Alongside other imported plants such as magnolia and aspidistra, which were also Victorian-era celebrities of the garden, pampas grass is now so common throughout the UK that I suspect the average person would never guess that it isn’t native. I, on the other hand, would likely remain non-native to Germany, if this last definition stands. And I’m ok with that. Perhaps what my train of thought is leaning towards here is that if pampas grass is not native to the UK, then any claim I have to be a British native is consequently made weaker. Conversely, it might just be the case that pampas grass is so integrated into the UK through cultural acceptance, not to mention ecologically as a result of climate change, that this grass is more native to the UK than I am.

Or maybe being native simply doesn’t cut it, for me or for pampas grass.

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Pampas grass is by no means unique in being a plant that has become appropriated by the UK and integrated into British culture. The cultural significance of tea in England and of potatoes in Ireland are the examples that immediately spring to mind. Yet, pampas grass has a bewildering variety of cultural associations attached to it that is, if nothing else, impressive. For example, throughout the early to mid-1900s it was a common prop in portrait photography studios in London. I was able to source the contact sheets of one studio in particular through the National Archives showing subject after subject posing against hand-painted backgrounds whilst holding the grass and sometimes hiding behind it (Fig. 4). Virginia Woolf wrote fondly of the pampas grass that once grew in the garden of her St. Ives getaway home, Talland House, making references to it in a number of her books as the marker of the border between home and beyond. The grass triggered Woolf’s exotic images of the Pampas region, though she never travelled there herself. (Sparks, 2020) In 1896 in the US, pampas grass even served a brief stint as a kind of political mascot when dried plumes of the grass were dyed in the colours of the American flag to become incorporated into the visual language of the Republican party. (The Daily Mail, 1896) It was the emblem of the Republican National Convention during this time (just think about that next time you see pampas grass used as decoration at a wedding).

Yet, for all its weird and wonderful associations in the UK and elsewhere, something that was for a long time lacking from my research was an understanding of the significance of pampas grass in Argentina, to Argentinians. It was at this point that I discovered the Argentine author W.H. Hudson, who emigrated to England in 1874 and became naturalised there whilst many others, conversely, were emigrating to Argentina during the ‘Great European Immigration Wave’ of 1850 to 1890. Hudson was a remarkable man. He grew up on the Pampas, and from a young age had a sincere love and reverence for nature. (Wilson, 2015, p. 154-175) He preferred the company of birds to the company of humans, and he detested hunting. Speaking of pampas grass specifically, he wrote:

“It would be impossible for me to give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite loveliness, at certain times and seasons, of this queen of grasses, the chief glory of the solitary pampa. Everyone is familiar with it in cultivation; but the garden-plant has a sadly decaying, draggled look at all times, and to my mind, is often positively ugly with its dense withering mass of coarse leaves, drooping on the ground, and bundle of spikes, always of the same dead white or dirty cream-colour. Now colour – the various ethereal tints that give a blush to its cloud-like purity – is one of the chief beauties of this grass on its native soil; and travellers who have galloped across the pampas at a season of the year when the spikes are dead, and white as paper or parchment, have certainly missed its greatest charm.” (Hudson, 1895, p. 6)

It struck me when I was reading Hudson’s reflections on pampas grass that despite its cultural success, geographical distribution, and ecological suitability outside of the Pampas region, through the eyes of someone who grew up there, at least, the beauty of pampas grass is a brief phenomenon created not by the plant itself but by its presence within a landscape under precise conditions. In other words, such a beauty that can never be repeated or recreated, but only experienced once – a beauty situated in memory and imagination. And I began to consider how my concept of nationhood is not unlike Hudson’s concept of beauty. My sense of being British is formed by the memories I have of growing up in the countryside of Hertfordshire. Revisiting my childhood home in December wasn’t enough to re-kindle my connection to my British identity because, in truth, the farmhouse itself was just one part of what made my childhood so special and lovely. Those memories can’t be recreated.

If I am a native of England, then it is through my childhood memories in Hertfordshire, and my family, that this sense of national belonging is constructed and sustained. Somewhere in those jumbled memories, and in my sense of being British, are my experiences of the pampas grass in our old front garden (Fig. 5), making pampas grass, if nowhere else, native to me and me to it.

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^{Fig. 1: Little East Hall Farmhouse, Dec 2023}

^{Fig. 2: Pampas grass sample ©Royal Botanic Gardens Kew}

^{Fig. 3: Sportforum Hohenschönhausen, Berlin, Jan 2024}

^{Fig. 4: Contact sheet from Alfred Ellis Studio, Feb 20th, 1903 ©National Archives England}

^{Fig. 5: Little East Hall Farmhouse, Dec 1995}

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Jeremy Knowles

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