Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Landscape Research
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713437121
Living with and looking at landscape
David Lowenthal a
a
University College London, UK
ABSTRACT Landscape is experienced in countless ways by all human beings, both individually
and as members of communities, nations and humanity as a whole. Concern for rural locales as
the loci of social, economic and domestic existence has, in recent centuries, often been seen in
accord, but more usually in conict, with attachment to the scenic qualities of landscape couched
in aesthetic terms. Celebrated in art and in history, landscapes connote stability and security, but
living with them is regarded as a virtue, looking at them condemned as shallow scenic
appreciation. The stress between these two sets of values is exacerbated by the decline of rural
economies throughout the developed world, the abandonment of agricultural landscapes and the
loss of traditional countryside ties. Shifting landscape attachments reect the timing, extent and
current pace of rural depopulation. Whether despite or owing to their increasing remoteness from
everyday life, landscapes are heavily freighted with moral and symbolic worth as ecological
paradigms and as rightful common inheritances, while spurned as scenically frivolous.
KEY WORDS: Landscape aesthetics, rural attachments, agricultural decline, scenery, tourism
Correspondence Address: David Lowenthal, Pearson Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT.
Email: d.lowenthal@ucl.ac.uk. David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography, University College
London.
the detached contemplation thought to engender its appreciation. Scenic charms are
derided as supercial, frivolous, even soulless; to dwell on decor is to scant integral
landscape values, notably ecological tness, residential sustainability, community
health and historical authenticity. A leading cultural landscape text refers to
aesthetic objectives only to note the disastrous eects of applying them at Cades
Cove National Park (Alanen & Melnick, 2000, p. 128). Not one essay in a recent set
on landscape form, process and function discusses appearance or aesthetics, let alone
taste or beauty (Crews-Meyer & Young, 2006). Even to mention how a landscape
looks would seem to distract attention from the serious issue of how it functions.
Here I show how ongoing rural change rst fuels and then invalidates this anti-
aesthetic stance.
region with the beauty of another so that we may realize the beauty of each with a
greater intensity and clearness. That project remains unrealized, perhaps unrealiz-
able.
Cultural Dierences
Linguistics alone throws up daunting impediments. Landscape, landschaft, land-
schap, landscab, territoire, territorio, paysage, paesaggio imply dierent emphases on
site and scene, occupance and observation (Scazzosi, 2004, pp. 338, 349). Syntactical
phraseology reveals embedded cultural distinctions. A sign in the Swiss village of
Chateau dOex says in English Please do not pick the owers. In German: It is
forbidden to pick the owers. In French: Those who love the mountains, leave them
their owers. These phrases prescribe divergent approaches toward the same aim
English courteous behaviour, German minatory prohibition, French aesthetic
fondness.
Cultural tradition shapes other dierences. Fondness for slow accretion in old
England, to give one example, may be said to contrast with creative urgency in new
America, and with abrupt disjunction between pre- and post-Islamic features in
Egypt. Cultural cleavage fragments the Egyptian scene, disjoining ancient from
modern. Here stand pharaonic temples and concrete apartment houses, [but]
nothing links them (Fedden, 1945, pp. 8 9). The pharaonic past has small appeal to
Muslims, except to be touted to tourists; Egypts pagan residues aront Islamic faith.
Nilotic antiquity is a rejected cultural heritage, left to the enjoyment (and often the
theft) of aliens (Geuze, 2007).
The English landscape, in contrast, is quintessentially lauded as a legibly enduring,
ever-accreting palimpsest, the closest thing we will ever experience to a time
machine (Oliver, 2007, p. 8). The historian W. G. Hoskins (1963, p. 228), scanning
from the standpoint of a Saxon boundary bank, could tell:
which of these farms is recorded in Domesday Book, and which came in the
great 13th century colonisation; to see the Georgian stucco house of some
impoverished squire whose ancestors settled on that hillside in the time of King
John and took their name from it; to know that behind one there lies an ancient
estate of St Bonifaces long-vanished abbey, and that in front stretches the
demesne farm of Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings; to be aware . . . that one is
part of an immense unbroken stream that has owed over this scene for more
than a thousand years.
These ancestral traces merge in Englands famed lowland tapestry, vaunted as the
multi-generational creation of its people and requiring their continuing protection
and improvement. But to understand and appreciate this palimpsest requires
historically informed observation. As Julian Barness (1998, p. 60) ctional theme-
park entrepreneur puts it,
no doubt have assumed that Dame Nature was going about her eternal
business. I knew better. . . . The hill was an Iron Age burial mound, the
undulating eld a vestige of Saxon agriculture, the copse was a copse only
because a thousand other trees had been cut down, the river was a canal and the
pheasant had been hand-reared by a gamekeeper.
The English landscape was extolled as a product of sustained and orderly eort by
explicit contrast with untamed America, in terms that married aesthetic with social
and political propriety, in the wake of the American Revolution and in the midst of
the French. On lawns . . . smoothed by healthful industry, Anna Seward deplored
the picturesque Jacobinism of taste that would have nature as well as man indulged
in that uncurbed and wild luxuriance, which must soon render our landscape-island
rank, weedy, damp, and unwholesome as the incultivate savannas of America.2 Two
centuries later the same sentiment persists. If you could get through the bogs and
jungles and the thickets [that covered] this country one million years ago, declared a
recent Tory environment minister, you would say, What a dreadful place. The
valleys were mosquito-ridden swamps; the mountains were covered in hideous oak
thickets and there were just a few shacks, where miserable people attempted to live.
Now this is a country full of beautiful landscape . . . , all built by man, and we are
constantly enhancing it.3
Pioneer American settlers likewise accounted the wilderness a dangerous and
unsightly impediment. The contrary taste, rapturous adoration of divine nature
unsullied by human impress, emerged later, as wilderness dwindled and noxious
cities spread. Two examples must suce here. Americas most popular historian,
George Bancroft ([1837] 1842 1874, 2, pp. 271 272), compared the Hudson River
valley previous to European settlement with the scene of his own day. When Henry
Hudson rst saw it in 1607,
vegetable life and death were mingled hideously together. The horrors of
corruption frowned on the fruitless fertility of uncultivated nature. Reptiles
sported in the stagnant pools, or crawled unharmed over piles of mouldering trees;
masses of decaying vegetation fed the exhalations with the seeds of pestilence.
The earth glows with the colors of civilization; the banks of the streams are
enamelled with the richest grasses; woodlands and cultivated elds are
harmoniously blended . . . The thorn has given way to the rosebush; the
cultivated vine clambers over rocks where the brood of serpents used to nestle;
while industry smiles at the changes she has wrought, and inhales the bland air
which now has health on its wings. And man is still in harmony with nature,
which he has subdued, cultivated, and adorned.
emblems of horrendous desecration. The loggers axe and the hewn stump no longer
meant the advance of civilization; they now denoted the rape of innocent nature
(Cikovsky, 1971; Cox et al., 1985, pp. 144 147). Wrecked by soulless loggers,
Cumberland Gaps once crystal-clear stream was laden with sawdust and black as
soot. The novels protagonist, a mining engineer turned nature lover, vows to
restore Lonesome Cove: Ill tear down those mining shacks, . . . stock the river with
bass again. And Ill plant young poplars to cover the sight of every bit of uptorn
earth along the mountain there. Ill bury every bottle and tin can in the Cove. Ill
take away every sign of civilization . . . and leave old Mother Nature to cover up the
scars (Fox, 1908, pp. 201 202). Landscape beauty and spiritual regeneration
required eradicating the marks of industry and restoring wild nature.
These visual preferences are saturated with moral judgements about untouched
and inhabited landscapes. A dierent Old World slant emerges in John Ruskins
double evocation of the Swiss Jura: as he saw it in Switzerland, and as he imagined it
in America. His Seven Lamps of Architecture ([1848] 1961, pp. 167 69) limns a
delectable pastoral forest, blessed with all the solemnity [yet] none of the savageness
of the Alps, where clear green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under
the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such
company of joyful owers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the
earth. The scene seemed to Ruskin dependent on nothing beyond its own secluded
and serious beauty. But then he paused, imagining it not in Switzerland, but rather
a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent:
The writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill [thus] cast upon
it . . . The owers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became
oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed
how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not
theirs . . . Those ever springing owers and ever owing streams had been dyed
by the deep colors of human endurance, valor, and virtue; and the crests of the
sable hills . . . received a deeper worship
from the ramparts of the Castle of Grandson, that massive structural memory of
Swiss medieval valour, at their border.
In short, landscape achieves beauty only when enlivened by hoary human history.
It followed that the charm of romantic association[of] ruins and traditions, the
remains of architecture, the traces of battleelds, the precursorship of eventful
historycan be felt only by the European. The instinct to which it appeals can
hardly be felt in America (Ruskin, [1873] 1886, p. 292). American travellers home
from visits to Europe concurred with Ruskin, bemoaning their raw, unnished land.
The absence of a pictured, illuminated Past, judged the historian John Lothrop
Motley (1849), left America with a naked and impoverished appearance. All new
and bare, felt William Cullen Bryant, it had merely the beauty of a face without an
expression [because] it wants the associations of tradition which are the soul and
interest of scenery.4 In short, the nature and presence (or absence) of cultural
context determined reactions to landscape. Changing preferences for scenes
variously enhanced by or largely devoid of human impress continue to embroil
landscape devotees the world over.
640 D. Lowenthal
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
is struck by the manner in which the [trees] roots hold the ground, and sets
himself to examine their bres, little more conscious of the beauty of the tree
than if he were a rope-maker untwisting the strands of a cable. Struck by certain
groupings of their colours, [the artist] note[s them] mechanically for future use,
with as little feeling as a cook setting down the constituents of a newly
discovered dish. [To the nostalgic traveller] the sight of the trees calls up some
happy association, and presently he forgets them, and pursues the memories
they summoned; [the poet-fantasist] impressed by the wild coiling of the boughs
and roots, changes them in his fancy into dragons and monsters.
But comprehensive awareness of the trees requires all these perceptions and trains of
thought to be combined. The power of fully perceiving any natural object depends
on grouping and fastening all our fancies about it as a centre.5 And to Ruskins
several perspectives should be added those of resident and visitor, developer and
naturalist, ecologist and conservationist, and nowadays tour guide and advertising
copywriter.6
local, the particular, the authentic, the natural. As natural (not contrived),
landscape reects what is trusted. As the locus of everyday life, landscape oers
readily visible linkages. As typical and commonplace, landscape expresses popular
will at every scale from neighbourhood to nation.
By turning elds and meadows into landscape, landlords sacriced living com-
munities to gardenesque greed. Innocent virtue and rustic simplicity were expunged
by ruthless and immoral power, to satisfy an inhumane perverted aesthetic.
Beyond the landscape gardeners aesthetic, landscape painting was long held the
lowest of the arts. Devotees of the picturesque and the sublime repudiated workaday
rural scenes as vulgar, urging artists to stick to picturesque ruins. But even the nest
landscape in and of itself was inferior to delineations of humans and their creations
(Hewison, 1976; Payne, 1993). Nature, thought incoherent because unintentional,
lacked ideal forms toward which painters might strive. Hence landscape depiction
could not be morally uplifting. No landscape is a whole, or even a complete part of
an organic whole, explained a 19th-century authority:
Modern Acclamation
Yet it was precisely these enemies of all things beautiful who were now landscapes
most avid admirers. By the mid-20th century, thought Clark (1956, p. 142), almost
every Englishman [presumably excepting his average layman], if asked what he
meant by beauty, would begin to describe a landscapeperhaps a lake and
mountain, perhaps a cottage garden, perhaps a wood with bluebells and silver
birches . . . ; but, at all events, a landscape. Half a century before, scenic
representations of every kind had become far and away the most popular artistic
Living with and Looking at Landscape 643
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
The farmer-cum-ecologist vision dies hard; those still on the land are still apt to be
so adulated. But awareness of intensive exploitationhedges uprooted, mass use of
commercial fertilizer, vast tracts converted to prairies and conifer foresterodes this
image. The demigod farmer faithful to conserved tradition gets deposed; stewardship
passes from born countryman to anxious urbanite. Many of UNESCOs newly
designated cultural landscapes of universal value are precious conjunctions of
nature and culture too fragile to survive without international protection (Rossler,
2006, p. 348).
agritourism for its natural balance and simplicity, notably in the presence of
livestock (Chesshire, 2007, p. 28). Many pastoral landscapes survive largely through
tourism. In 20 years time all Lakeland farmers will have given up farming, forecast
a local in 1991. Theyll be called eld wardens. Theyll build up dry stone walls, then
knock them down again to amuse the tourists . . . Sheep will become pets, never sold
or killed.14
Cattle instead of sheep have been Dutch rural icons since van Ruysdaels 17th-
century paintings: a dappled hide against a green landscape is more a logo of the
Netherlands than the tulip. Half the farms in the Netherlands remain sustainable
largely as bovine scenery; seeing cows grazing charms latter-day Marie-Antoinettes.
Hence to keep our landscape beautiful and colorful, Dutch authorities exhort
farmers, keep the cows in sight (Metz, 2002, pp. 186 188). (The American cows on
eastern Long Island pastures, frozen in rumination at the old farm fence where
actual cows once grazed, are plastic [Clines, 2007].) Nostalgia for domestic animals
reects yearning for rural scenes endowed with active lifelandscapes vitalized by
moving creatures. Horses, long gone as part of the workaday round, let alone as
denizens of the Elysian elds (Olwig, 2002, p. 107), become pets emblematic of
healthy outdoor life (Metz, 2002, pp. 188 189).
But it is above all the lack of people that makes the current countryside feel
moribund; essay after essay in Grantas 2005 Country Life issue (subtitled
Dispatches from whats left of it) notes the eerie absence of human beings. To be
sure, emptiness for many is the scenic ideal; beauty spots were by denition
uninhabited, recalled Raphael Samuel (1998, p. 143) of his war-time childhood, and
ideally places where there was not a soul to be seen. Coee-table and cinematic
English landscapes are still depopulated. Photographed England now looks as if a
neutron bomb has hit it: no damage to buildings or landscapes but people have been
utterly removed (Nicolson, 1992, p. 28). In the lush timeless landscape of the typical
Merchant-Ivory lm, hills, trees and sheep are eternal, the human presence
ephemeral and intrusive (Cardwell, 2002, p. 141).
If the countryside is going to provide anything other than rural theme parks for
the urban middle classes and wide expanses of chemical monoculture, writes rural
activist Simon Fairlie (Halfacree, 2006, p. 329), then more people are needed to live
and work there. The more probable rural future is theme-park contrivance.
Anticipating his retirement 30 years on, Britains Nature Conservancy Councils
director-general envisaged an outing in 2020 to Center Parc,
a wonderful, enormous dome, under which private enterprise conserves rare and
representative re-created countrysides and stunning holographs of romantic
landscapes now lost. On the way back, I visit the small thatched mock Tudor
cottage . . . with blown up photographs of some striking buildings the National
Trust used to run before they were either inundated or made way for the
wonderful motorway. I sail over to a splendidly landscaped golf course for the
senior Japanese businessmen whose microchip factories stretch to the horizon.
(Hornsby, 1989)
With that stage-set now just a decade o we need only replace Japanese with
Chinese entrepreneurs, and Center Parc with Julian Barness Isle of Wight theme
Living with and Looking at Landscape 647
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
After the peasants abandoned the countryside, all fell into ruins. But the new
masters began living there. The richest acquired entire farms and villages. But
no one was around to keep up their estates or to serve them. They themselves
were forced to cut their own lawns, prune their own trees, care for their animals,
and ght against wild vegetation. And of course they began to love the land.
They took pride in picking, harvesting, and eating what they themselves had
grown. They rediscovered the taste of fruit and even bread.15 Their country
homes became their only homes, protected from the common people now
locked up in the cities . . . So the former bourgeoisie became professional
peasants, while [urbanized] descendants of the former peasants consoled
themselves with electronic toys. (Helias, 1978, pp. 335 336)
and labourers remain on arable land; but many folk, though not yet most, are
industrial or urban. The two-thirds of Romanias economy that is urban and
industrial ourishes; the rural remainder is languishing, its demise sped by European
Union membership as of 2007. Not even Albania or Kosovo are any longer
overwhelmingly rural. Free enterprise since 1991 combined with EU incentives leave
once Sovietized lands bereft of youth, who are no longer compelled to labour locally
and now seize chances to emigrate west (Brunwasser, 2006).
Rapidly changing economic priorities run counter to EU environmental directives,
notably Natura 2000, which mandates the protection of natural habitat and
biodiversity by setting aside substantial areas against development. Bulgaria has
some of Europes most untouched natureindeed, initial set-aside proposals
included 40% of Bulgarias territory, almost three times the European average.
But EU pleas to respect nature conservations long-term benets are ercely resisted
by Bulgarians eager to shed impoverished isolation for the immediate prots of
package tourism (Brunwasser, 2007).
Agricultural attitudes persist, to be sure. Rural dwellers take proprietary pride in
landscape as hearth and livelihood. More than their west European counterparts,
farmers and herders often remain intolerant of holiday-makers, folklife tourists, and
eco-cultists. Yet they can hardly resist their lures. In villages like Romanias Matau,
bulldozers are churning up the meadows to create a ski run and holiday resort, while
wealthy outsiders buy up land for holiday villas. In Matau, nonetheless, a western
visitor pens a contrasting scene of Paradise Lost with a moral avour reminiscent of
Goldsmiths Deserted Village:
I have discovered Heaven . . . a peasant village high in the hills of Romania, the
newest and poorest member of the European Union . . . Its homes of carved
wood and patterned plaster are topped by hay lofts, encircled by orchards,
enclosed by picket fences. They have views across a deep valley to the forests
and snowy peaks of the Carpathian mountains . . . the winter air is scented by
woodsmoke and dung. The silence is broken only by cowbells, the bleating of
sheep and, at dawn, cocks crowing. . . . The big-handed, leather-faced, pungent-
smelling subsistence farmers of Matau still live much as their ancestors have for
generations. They keep a few cows, pigs and chickens in their yards. . . . They cut
grass with scythes and make haystacks . . . [At church on] the Saturday of the
Dead, when the villagers remember departed family, [they] crossed themselves
as one, knelt as one and sang in sweet harmony. They were at peace with the
past, with themselves and with nature. For how much longer? (Fletcher, 2007)
That the departed family now includes not just the dead but almost every villager
under 30 gives the answer to how much longer.
stability.16 Over the past century, planned obsolescence has made most man-made
things less durable than us mortals. But rural nature, we like to suppose, remains
dependably constant. The countryside reassures us that not everything is
supercial and transitory, concludes the English rural sociologist Howard Newby
(1990); that some things remain stable, permanent and enduring. Rurality sanctions
the status quo. Invoking rural roots, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (1926, p. 101)
termed himself not the man in the street even, but a man in a eld-path, a
much simpler person steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas. More
changeless still seem rural animals. People comethey stay for a while, they
ourish, they buildand they go. It is their way, says Badger in Kenneth
Grahames The Wind in the Willows ([1908] 2005, p. 48). But we remain. . . . We are
an enduring lot. It is a truth as well as a truism that nouveaux-riches, whose
industrial energy spearheads rural change, now ock to live in the countryside
because they like it as it is, with its traditions and seclusion, its hedge-laying and its
bluebell woods (The Times, 2007a).
Yet it is readily apparent that landscapes are in continual ux (Rackham, 1991).
We know full well that they are malleable, altered for better or worse by each
generation. Each successive tenancy transforms what is tilled or left fallow with new
crops, fertilizers, machinery, pests and pesticides. We shape landscapes to suit
ourselves and to leave our own mark on them; we describe and depict them in
idealizing images; and we reshape them after those images, as with Arcadian parks
modelled on Claude and Poussin, gardens after Capability Brown and Humphrey
Repton, Constable-like suburbs in Surrey, or American Civil War battleelds
restored to resemble photographs artfully composed by Matthew Brady. Most such
changes are lauded not as alterations but as reversions to how things once were, were
meant to have been, ought to have been.
Perception of scenery is open only to those who play no real part in the
landscape. Those who know it and work in it have to concentrate on
the humdrum realities; the choice is between the mawkish sentiments of the
passengers and the bleak matter-of-factness of the pilot (Marx, 1964, p. 364).
Asked to be pilot or passenger, what red-blooded American would hesitate? We
are all pilots, happy only when steering some ship. . . . We disdain the mere
onlooker and dismiss his opinion of the landscape. What right has a passive
spectator to impose his judgment . . . We do not prettify the rugged face of
workaday America in order to enjoy its looks. In short, the landscape is worthy
of its hire. (Lowenthal, 1968, p. 72)
That a landscapes rightful critics are its earth-bound occupiers, not its visitors, is
an insight famously attributed to William James ([1899] 1958, pp. 150 152). James
contrasted his own reaction to that of inhabitants of a newly cleared and planted
North Carolina cove:
standing . . . and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had improved it out of existence was
hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of articial grace to make up
for the loss of Natures beauty.
But when a settler remarked that we aint happy here, unless we are getting one of
these coves under cultivation, James realized that he had missed the scenes whole
inward signicance . . . To me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation . . . But,
when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory.
The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent
toil and nal reward. What was for James a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to
them a symbol redolent with moral memories. Scenic beauty was not just disjoined
from, but incompatible with, inherent landscape virtue.
Similar incongruities suuse writings on lived-in landscapes. At a slum in
Sunderland, Scotland, a 1970s planner saw a collection of shabby, mean and dreary
houses, derelict back lanes, shoddy-fronted shops and broken pavements, the whole
unsightly mess mercifully ill-lit. But the resident saw
the best butchers shop in town; George McKeiths wet-sh shop and Pearys
fried-sh shop . . . Maws hot pies and peas prepared on the premises; the Willow
Pond public house, in which her favourite nephew organizes the darts and
dominoes team; . . . the spacious cottage in which she was born and brought
up . . . (but which has some damp patches which make it classiable as a slum
dwelling); the short road to the cemetery where she cares for the graves of her
mother, father and brother.18
This is not scenery but a social scene. Likewise, the writer Helen Hooven Santmyer
(1962, p. 307) wrote of her childhood Ohio town as shabby, worn, and
unpicturesque. . . . In winter, with grey skies, soot-streaked pavements, and lumps
of black snow in the gutters, one could hardly help remarking how ugly the town
was, and how drab and dull. Yet, she added, that scene, so unconsciously accepted,
had its values for us:
the unfastidious heart makes up its magpie hoard, heedless of the protesting
intelligence. Valentines in a drugstore window, the smell of roasting coee,
sawdust on the butchers oor . . . these are as good to have known and
remembered, associated as they are with friendliness between man and man,
between man and child, as fair streets and singing towers and classic arcades.
(Santmyer, 1962, p. 50)
Such attachments persist past physical occupance. The Vermont farmer who sold
his farm to a summer resident was appalled on a visit back home to nd that the new
owner had torn down his barn. What did you do that for? he inquired,
incredulous. Well, the barn spoiled the view. View? View? Why, there was nothing
behind that barn but some mountains.
Native old-timers are not alone in championing social utility against scenery. They
are seconded by ecological purists, modernist architects, and self-appointed stewards
652 D. Lowenthal
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
the beauty of the place, a suave serene beauty in the massing of simple elements,
a grove, a house, a eld. Nowhere in the whole farm was there a place without
charm . . . They asked where I had been, and . . . suggested other places to which I
must be taken. But we crossed that eld, I said. Yes, on the west side, but
you ought to go to the other side and look back. [Discussing whether to cut
down some birch trees,] what interested them was the eect upon a certain view,
rather than the value of the wood. . . . They looked upon their whole farm as a
great living canvas, whose picture changed from moment to moment and hour
to hour, and to which they as artists made only little changes from time to time;
for the larger picture was painted mostly by nature and by generations . . . before
them. . . . No farmer merely farms but is an artist in landscape architecture
as well.
In planting they considered not only where things grew best, but how the eld will
look when they rst come up through the earth, and when they are full grown, and
when they are dead and when they are stubble. . . . The art . . . was neither agriculture
Living with and Looking at Landscape 653
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
nor architecture but a combination of both . . . (Wright, 1942, pp. 297 298).
The Islandian ethos is realized in the agricultural art of Laura Parker and on David
Mas Masumotos central California farm: my elds have become a crazy quilt of
cover crops, a wild blend of patterns, some intended, some a product of natures
whims. The dierent plants grow to dierent heights and in dierent patterns,
creating a living applique. . . . I weave the texture of life into my farm.19 The farmer
cum artist atly contradicts Theophile Gautiers maxim that nothing is truly
beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly
because it is the expression of some need, and those of men are ignoble and
disgusting.20
Few would dier with J. B. Jacksons dictum that We should never tinker with the
landscape without thinking of those who live in the midst of it. But what if those
who live in it, today as in Wrights day, ruined lovely views by unsightly structures.
It never occurred to anyone that an ordinary view was worth saving when put into
competition with a commercial interest (Wright, 1942). Like so many moralists,
Jackson asserts that what the spectator wants or does not want is of small
account . . . We are not spectators; the human landscape is not a work of art. It is the
temporary product of much sweat and hardship and earnest thought (Jackson,
1963 1964). Yet the accelerating demise of traditional rural life, the growth of
tourism and of part-time or permanent rural retreats nowadays make us all
spectators. At home as well as on holiday, en route as well as at rest, we savour
landscapes seen, felt, imagined and yearned for. Old distinctions between native and
outsider, between the purely pictorial gaze of the passer-by and contextual depth of
the long-time denizen, become ever less relevant. We are all now travelling viewers,
the commuter, the temporary inhabitant of a trailer court, the migrant farm laborer
and the man on a ve months luxury cruise, as Jackson (1962) elsewhere allowed.
We are all of us tourists. . . . Indeed it is one of the very few traits which we recognize
ourselves as having in common.
British landowners scorn rural policy being dictated from the car window.21 Yet
it is from the car window, moving along in the automobile (Dixon Hunt, 2004,
pp. 173 190) that millions enjoy the landscape, validating Emersons (1836, p. 597)
adage that one need only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the
street into a puppet-show, [for] the least change in our point of view gives the whole
world a pictorial air. Emerson privileged the stranger over the sojourner in nature.
Beds of owers send up a most grateful scent to the passenger who hastens by them,
but let him pitch his tent among them and he will nd himself grown insensible to
their fragrance.22 The gaze of the long-distance traveller, like that of hiker and
painter, weekender and day-outing pensioner, replaces the peasant grind of millennia
past. The Beholder in whose eye beauty lies is Everyman.
Notes
1 I expand on this in Lowenthal (1978).
2 To J. Johnson, 20 September 1794, in Seward (1811, 4, pp. 10 11).
3 Nicholas Ridley, in The Future of the Public Heritage, Cubitt Trust Panel conference, 15 October
1986 (London: Royal Society of Arts, 1987), p. 92. This section is elaborated in Lowenthal (2000).
4 On poetry in its relation to our age and country, Prose 1:24, quoted in Bryant (1970, p. 875).
5 I have renamed Ruskins idealist a fantasist.
654 D. Lowenthal
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
6 Advertisers are currently denounced for their illusionary pseudo-images of landscape (TOPIA
[International Organization for the Protection of Landscapes in Advertising]).
7 The decay of lying [1889], in Wilde (1954, pp. 57, 67, 79).
8 G. C. Hines, Cathedral pilgrimages, in Williams-Ellis (1938, pp. 160 161).
9 Lees-Milne (1983, diary entry 16 June 1947, p. 172).
10 William Beach Thomas, The English Landscape (1938), quoted in Chase (1989, p. 138).
11 This is elaborated in Lowenthal (1994) and Olwig (2002, pp. 165 167).
12 Lewis Gannett and Ruth Gannett, Cream Hill: Discourses of a Week-End Countryman (1949), quoted
in Simo (2005, p. 23).
13 Simon Riser, quoted in Toop (1993, p. 37).
14 Quoted in Davies (1991).
15 Twenty years after Helias, the French did rediscover good bread (Kaplan, 2006).
16 My notes give the sociologist August Comte as the source of this quotation, which I cannot nd.
17 Para-aesthetic taste echoes Japanese wabi: traditional love of the imperfect, fragmented, transient,
blemished and deformed exemplied today in the scenes and structures of Tadao Ando.
18 Norman Dennis, quoted in Taylor (1973, p. 226).
19 Parkers Landscape: The Farmer as Artist was exhibited at the Jewett Gallery of the San Francisco
Public Library in 2001; Masumoto describes his landscaping in Epitaph for a Peach (1996); she is cited
and he is quoted in Cohn (2004, pp. 73, 70).
20 Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), quoted in Atwood (2002, p. 59).
21 John Hopkinson, director, British Field Sports Society, quoted in Young (1990).
22 Emerson, Journals, 2: 232, quoted in Porte (1964, p. 471).
References
Alanen, A. R. & Melnick, R. Z. (2000) Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press).
Atwood, M. (2002) Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Baldwin, S. (1926) The classics, in his On England, pp. 99 118 (London: Philip Allan).
Bancroft, G. ([1837] 1842 1874) History of the United States from the Discovery of the American
Continent, 10th edn. (Boston, MA: C. C. Little and James Brown).
Barnes, J. (1998) England, England (London: Jonathan Cape).
Bennett, G. (1993) Folklore studies and the rural myth, Rural History, 4, pp. 1 15.
Botton, A. de (2007) The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life (London:
Penguin).
Brunwasser, M. (2006) In shrinking Bulgaria, where are the people? International Herald Tribune, 11
October, p. 2.
Brunwasser, M. (2007) Saving nature or saving the economy? EU sparks environmental battle in Bulgaria,
International Herald Tribune, 24 January, pp. 15 16.
Bryant II, W. C. (1970) Poetry and painting: a love aair of long ago, American Quarterly, 22,
pp. 859 882.
Cardwell, S. (2002) Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester
University Press).
Chase, M. (1989) This is no claptrap: this is our heritage. In C. Shaw & M. Chase (Eds) The Imagined Past:
History and Nostalgia, pp. 128 146 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Chesshire, T. (2007) Down on the farm, The Times (London), 20 January.
Cikovsky, N. (1971) The Ravages of the Axe: the meaning of the tree stump in nineteenth-century
American art, Art Bulletin, 61, pp. 611 626.
Clark, K. (1956) Landscape into Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Clines, F. X. (2007) Getting away to it all, New York Times, 2 June, p. A24.
Cohn, T. (2004) How far are you from the farm: a mile or a generation? The agricultural art of Laura
Parker, Places, 16(3), pp. 70 73.
Cox, T. R., et al. (1985) This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the
Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
Crews-Meyer, K. A. & Young, K. R. (Eds) (2006) Landscape form, process, and function: coalescing
geographic frontiers, Professional Geographer, 58, pp. 367 447.
Living with and Looking at Landscape 655
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
Davies, H. (1991) After the banknote, wheres the book? Independent on Sunday (London), 29 September, p. 23.
Dixon Hunt, J. (2004) The Afterlife of Gardens (London: Reaktion).
Ellman, R. (1993) Theres an Ambridge in all our hearts, The Times (London), 10 March.
Emerson, R. W. (1836) Nature, in: J. Conron (Ed.) The American Landscape: A Critical Anthology of
Prose and Poetry, pp. 579 608 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Fairclough, G. (2007) Made in England: landscape, culture and identity, Conservation Bulletin no. 54
(spring; special issue on Rural Landscapes), pp. 8 9.
Fedden, R. (1945) Introduction, in his Personal Landscape: An Anthology of Exile (London: Editions Poetry).
Fletcher, M. (2007) A village that time forgot, The Times (London), 21 February, T2, pp. 4 5.
Fox, J., Jr (1908) Trail of the Lonesome Pine (New York: Grosset & Dunlap).
Gallent, N. & Andersson, J. (2007) Representing Englands rural urban fringe, Landscape Research, 32,
pp. 1 21.
Geuze, A. (2007) The Pyramids at Giza Museum Gardens and the Nile cultural landscape, paper at
Spatial Recall: The Place of Memory in Architecture and Landscape, College of Environmental Design
symposium, University of California, Berkeley, 10 March.
Gordon, P. H. & Boisgrollier, N. de (2007) Why the French love their farmers, International Herald
Tribune, 1 December, p. 8.
Grahame, K. ([1908] 2005) The Wind in the Willows (London: Penguin).
Granta (2005) Country Life, no. 90 (summer).
Halfacree, K. (2006) From dropping out to leading on? British counter-culture back-to-the-land in a
changing rurality, Progress in Human Geography, 30, pp. 309 336.
Helias, P.-J. (1978) The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Hewison, R. (1976) John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (London: Thames and Hudson).
Hornsby, T. (1989) A stake in the country, in Future Countryside Programme, Royal Society of Arts,
London, 29 September.
Hoskins, W. G. (1963) Provincial England: Essays in Social and Economic History (London: Macmillan).
Hungerford, M. W. (1878) Molly Bawn (London: Smith, Elder).
Jackson, J. B. (1962) Traveling man, Landscape, 11(3), p. 1.
Jackson, J. B. (1963 1964) Notes and comments, Landscape, 13(2), pp. 1 3.
James, W. ([1899] 1958) On a certain blindness in human beings, in his Talks to Teachers on Psychology:
and to Students on Some of Lifes Ideals, pp. 149 169 (New York: W. W. Norton).
Johnston, P. (2006) Leave our glimpse of Stonehenge alone, The Daily Telegraph, 24 July.
Kaplan, S. L. (2006) Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made,
and the People Who Make It (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Kiberd, D. (1995) Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press).
Lees-Milne, J. (1983) Caves of Ice (London: Chatto & Windus).
Lowenthal, D. (1968) The American scene, Geographical Review, 58, pp. 61 88.
Lowenthal, D. (1978) Finding valued landscapes, Progress in Human Geography, 2, pp. 373 418.
Lowenthal, D. (1994) European and English landscapes as national symbols, in: D. Hooson (Ed.)
Geography and National Identity, pp. 15 38 (Oxford: Blackwell).
Lowenthal, D. (2000) Old World eyes, New World scenes: embellishing divergence, in: Humanizing
Landscapes: Geography, Culture & the Magoon Collection, pp. 1 20 (Poughkeepsie, NY: Frances
Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College).
Lowenthal, D. & Prince, H. C. (1965) English landscape tastes. Geographical Review, 55, pp. 196 222.
Mabey, R. (2005) Nature Cure (London: Chatto & Windus).
MacCannell, D. (1976) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken).
Marsh, G. P. (1848) Address Delivered before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, Sept. 20, 1847
(Rutland: VT).
Marsh, G. P. (1860) The study of nature, Christian Examiner, 68, pp. 33 62.
Marx, L. (1964) The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York:
Oxford University Press).
Masterman, C. F. G. (1909) The Condition of England (London: Methuen).
Metz, T. (2002) Fun! Leisure and Landscape (Rotterdam: NAI Publications).
Motley, J. L. (1849) Polity of the Puritans, North American Review, 69, pp. 493 494.
National Trust Magazine (2002) Heart of stone, no. 97 (autumn), pp. 46 47.
656 D. Lowenthal
Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 07:26 9 March 2008
Newby, H. (1990) Revitalizing the countryside: the opportunities and pitfalls of counter-urban trends,
Royal Society of Arts Journal, 138, pp. 630 636.
Nicolson, A. (1992) Panoramas of England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
Oliver, T. (2007) CPRE calls for deeds not words, Conservation Bulletin, no. 54 (spring; special issue on
Rural Landscapes), pp. 6 8.
Olwig, K. R. (2002) Nature and the Body Politic: From Britains Renaissance to Americas New World
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
Orwin, C. S. (1945) Problems of the Countryside (Cambridge: The University Press).
Payne, C. (1993) Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780 1890
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Porte, J. (1964) Nature as symbol: Emersons noble doubt, New England Quarterly, 37, pp. 453 476.
Prall, D. W. (1929) Aesthetic Judgment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell).
Rackham, O. (1991) Landscape and the conservation of meaning, Royal Society of Arts Journal, 139,
pp. 903 915.
Rossler, M. (2006) World heritage cultural landscapes: a UNESCO agship programme 1992 2006,
Landscape Research, 31, pp. 333 353.
Ruskin, J. ([1848] 1961) The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Noonday Press).
Ruskin, J. ([1853] 1886) The Stones of Venice (New York: Wiley).
Ruskin, J. ([1873] 1886) Modern Painters, 4 vols, 3rd edn (New York: Wiley).
Santayana, G. (1896) The Sense of Beauty, Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Charles
Scribners Sons).
Samuel, R. (1998) Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London: Verso).
Santmyer, H. H. (1962) Ohio Town (Columbus: Ohio State University Press).
Scazzosi, L. (2004) Reading and assessing the landscape as cultural and historical heritage, Landscape
Research, 29, pp. 335 355.
Seward, A. (1811) Letters of Anna Seward, Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols, 3rd edn
(Edinburgh).
Simo, M. J. (2005) Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day 1970 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press).
Steinbeck, J. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath (London: Heinemann).
Stig Srensen, M. L. (1996) The fall of a nation, the birth of a subject: the national use of archaeology in
nineteenth-century Denmark, in: M. Daz-Andreu & T. Champion (Eds) Nationalism and Archaeology
in Europe, pp. 24 47 (London: UCL Press).
Taylor, M. (2007) AONBs: managing landscapes of complex value, Conservation Bulletin, no. 54 (spring;
special issue on Rural Landscapes), pp. 33 35.
Taylor, N. (1973) The Village in the City (London: Temple Smith).
Thompson, I. (2006) Review of K. R. Olwig, Nature and the Body Politic [q.v.], Landscape Research, 31,
pp. 183 184.
Tilden, F. (1977) Interpreting Our Heritage, 3rd edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
The Times (London) (2005) Awe sum, 25 July.
The Times (London) (2007a) Green and pleasant prices, 24 February, p. 20.
The Times (2007b) Farming mysteries, 28 February.
Toop, D. (1993) Going down to Eaviss farm, The Times (London), 25 June.
Tveit, M., Ode, A. & Fry, G. (2006) Key concepts in a framework for analysing visual landscape character,
Landscape Research, 31, pp. 229 255.
Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage).
Watkin, D. (1977) Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and
Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Wilde, O. (1954) De Profundis and Other Writings (London: Penguin).
Williams-Ellis, C. (Ed.) (1938) Britain and the Beast (London: J. M. Dent).
Wright, A. T. (1942) Islandia (New York: Farrar & Rinehart).
Young, J. (1990) Green policies may harm wildlife, The Times, 18 August, p. 7.
Younghusband, F. (1920) Natural beauty and geographical science, Geographical Journal, 56, pp. 1 13.
Zalesch, S. E. (1996) What the four million bought: cheap oil paintings of the 1880s, American Quarterly,
48, pp. 77 109.