A short, slightly rambling, college assignment-related whinge: back when I were a gardener, I always use to be a little sniffy about the whole concept of garden design, which seemed to me to be a way of making something very simple complicated in order to justify your consultant's fee. There were three important things: what do you want there, will it grow there and does it look nice and the rest is all just guff to make you sound like you know what you're talking about.
Currently, I am writing about 'landscape character' which, similarly, seems to be about thinking up the correct adjectives and crowbarring a landscape into an arbitrary set of values decided by somebody else. Generally speaking, the longer ago a landscape was shaped, the more value it has and therefore the more worth it has. Quaint and pastoral is 'good', anything else is bad.
Personally, I have my own, slightly eclectic, views on landscape beauty. I quite like post-industrial wasteland, for example. As well as this, I have a very pragmatic 'well, this is what we've got' attitude to dealing with it. Make what you have beautiful and biodiverse. Preserve by all means but everything changes with time and you can never be sure that our attempts to correct the mistakes of our recent ancestors will not also be condemned by future generations.
No comments:
Post a Comment