Since John Dixon Hunt first suggested the notion of the ‘three natures’, there has been much speculation about whether the number of categories needs to be expanded. If a farmed landscape is deliberately left unmanaged as part of a policy of ‘re-wilding’, is the ensuing landscape part of first nature (wilderness), second nature (cultivation), or third nature (designed with aesthetic intent)? The very term ‘landscape’ carries with it the notion of a hybrid between nature and culture. Some say that we need the concept of ‘fourth nature’ to cover such conceptually complex places as managed nature reserves, reclaimed landscapes, restored habitats, and so on. But even without the complication of fourth nature, there are problems enough about making aesthetic intent the criterion for deciding between the commonplace landscapes of second nature and the pleasure grounds of third nature. Aesthetics is often an issue, even for workaday places.
This is easily illustrated by the case of the ferme ornée (literally the ornamented farm), an idea that caught on among 18th-century English landowners. We owe the term to Stephen Switzer (1682–1745) an early exponent of the English Landscape School. It referred to an estate laid out partly according to aesthetic principles and partly for efficient farming. The most famous example was the poet William Shenstone’s garden at the Leasowes, Shropshire, which was visited by many eminent figures including William Gilpin, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson. If a productive farm could be laid out as a pleasure ground, why then could not other sorts of useful places, such as forests, cemeteries, or reservoirs? Even if a place is essentially utilitarian, why should it not also be pleasing, or at least not be ugly?
Even without much ‘improvement’, everyday landscapes can give aesthetic pleasure. One only has to think how often farmland has been the subject of painting; Breughel, Hobbema, Van Gogh, and Constable all found sufficient interest in fields to want to paint them. Picturesque painters were not averse to moving things around on the canvas or exaggerating vertical dimensions, if it produced a pleasing effect. Landscape architects have the means to move vast quantities of earth, if needs be, and are employed to improve the appearance of actual landscapes, not just their representations; although presenting proposals to clients, committees, and planning inspectors is also an art (perhaps occasionally a shady one).
In Britain, where the Institute of Landscape Architects (now called the Landscape Institute) was founded in 1929, in the heyday of Modernism, practitioners took the creed of functionalism and translated it into a concern for combining use with beauty. The founders of the ILA came from a variety of backgrounds. Geoffrey Jellicoe was an architect who had completed a study of Italian Gardens while studying at the Architectural Association, London. Brenda Colvin (1897–1981), who in 1951 became the organization’s first woman president, had trained at Swanley Horticultural College, originally intending to specialize in fruit growing. Thomas Sharp (1901–78) was an up-and-coming town-planner, who would later pioneer ideas of urbanism. The new body’s first president was Thomas Mawson (1861–1933), a well-known garden designer who had progressed to town-planning and had already served as president of the Town Planning Institute. The founders dithered for a while over the name, eventually following the American precedent. As many of them had been working on private garden design, there was briefly some thought of having ‘Landscape Gardeners’ in the title. Colvin later reflected upon what a mistake this would have been: ‘it would have taken us much longer to arrive at the full scope the profession has today—if we had arrived at it at all’.
The presence of so many architects and planners in the group ensured that the new institute would not become a coterie of garden designers, but the ‘full scope of the profession’ only really began to emerge after the end of the Second World War, when the national mood favoured cooperation and reconstruction. The country was wrecked and a returning army expected better living conditions. In this era of post-war consensus, with its measured socialism and Keynesian economics, landscape architects often became involved in large public projects. Significantly, from the 1950s through to the 1980s, the public sector remained the largest employer of landscape architects in Britain. It is only after Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution that the private sector has employed more, although the Groundwork organization (a charity consisting of numerous local trusts) is now the largest single employer overall.
Among British landscape architects, there is nostalgia for this socially progressive era, because the founders discovered a clarity of purpose which is less often found today, and they were able to influence, not just large scale projects, but also national planning policies. There was also a galvanizing urgency about the problems the country faced, because new housing development, large pieces of infrastructure, and technological developments in farming were rapidly altering the face of the landscape. Many of these issues will seem familiar, not just to British readers who might easily think that we face similar problems today, but also to anyone living in a country which is undergoing modernization, rapid economic development, and landscape change. This makes it worth looking at this period in Britain in more detail.
Agriculture is a good place to begin since many people, when asked to imagine a landscape, will think of fields, farms, and cultivation. Brenda Colvin’s Land & Landscape, first published in 1940 with a revised second edition in 1970, devoted a chapter to it. The ‘humanized, well-lived-in’ landscape had an organic beauty, Colvin argued, which could be put at risk by changes of ‘policy, use and custom’. The evils of the day were what she called ‘suburban spread’ (we would now call it ‘sprawl’ and it will appear again in later chapters), new roads and their associated ‘ribbon development’, and changes to the system of agriculture. There was, certainly, a class dimension to the panic over ribbon development, and it is interesting to contrast the moral outrage expressed in a book like England and the Octopus, architect Clough Williams-Ellis’s blast against market forces in development, with geographer and writer John Brinkerhoff Jackson’s celebration, in the pages of his own magazine Landscape (published 1951–68), of the everyday American landscape of the road, including strip malls, trailer camps and fast-food joints.
In Britain, food security was of concern to the generations who had experienced wartime rationing, but Colvin was worried too about industrial farming, arguing that hedgerows did not need to be ripped out to create efficient farms. ‘We too readily discount as “sentimental nonsense”’ she wrote, ‘any arguments based on the appearance of the landscape, still reacting to the idea of use versus beauty.’ In landscape, she asserted, use and beauty are ‘fundamentally complementary’. She was not, however, against change, as long as it was thoughtfully considered, which is to say well planned and designed. So, in the middle of a fairly conservative chapter, Colvin suddenly suggests that as far as field patterns are concerned ‘we might find that a hexagonal cellular system would be more easily worked, and could provide positions for trees and barns in the angles.’ I do not think this idea ever caught on, but it shows a designer thinking through the problem of combining productive efficiency with other virtues that a landscape might possess.
If unrestrained speculative development was to be brought under control, as indeed it was by post-war planning legislation, then it followed that housing shortages would have to be tackled by the comprehensive redevelopment of poor quality housing stock in cities and the creation of well-planned new towns located in the countryside. The model for this latter form of development had been provided by the town-planner Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) in his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow, who had argued for the creation of a new landscape type which would combine the best aspects of urban living, such as full employment and pleasant society, with the best of country life, such as fresh air and bright homes and gardens, but without the worst features of either: foul air and high rents in the city, or poverty and unemployment in the countryside. The new hybrid was Town-Country and Howard’s proposed way of creating it was to build small, self-contained towns, each of no more than 35,000 people, offering jobs and entertainment as well as fields and the beauties of nature. These ideal places were known as Garden Cities and the first two were created at Letchworth (founded 1903) and Welwyn Garden City (founded 1920), both in the orbit of London. These, in turn, inspired the building of a wave of new towns, created under the New Towns Act (1946) and subsequent legislation. There were 11 new towns in the first wave, including Basildon, Essex (designated 1949), Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire (1947), Corby, Northamptonshire (1950), and Peterlee, County Durham (1948). A second wave was built between 1961–4, again in response to housing shortages, and a third wave between 1967–70. Five new towns were built in Scotland, including Cumbernauld (1956) where the landscape architect was Peter Youngman (1911–2005), another member of the pioneering generation.
Landscape architects were involved from the outset. Jellicoe drew up the first plans for Hemel Hempstead based on a variation of the Garden City ideal, in his own words ‘not a city in a garden, but a city in a park’. His radical plans were resisted by local people and revised, but he was invited back to design the Water Gardens (1947) where he experimented with the use of symbolism in design. The decorative canal, with its delicate footbridges, was designed in the shape of a serpent, with a fountain where the eye might be and a weir for its mouth. Frederick Gibberd (1908–84), architect, planner, and landscape architect, produced the plans for Harlow New Town, and kept faith in his creation by living there for the rest of his life. Gibberd used the existing topography to structure the town, siting new built areas on the higher ground, separated by open land in the valleys between them. Another pioneering designer, Sylvia Crowe (1901–97), was involved at Hemel Hempstead and Harlow, and then went on to produce landscape plans for Basildon.
The development corporations for later new towns tended to use in-house landscape architects rather than hire outside consultants. Landscape teams under forward-thinking leadership produced innovative ideas. Notably in Warrington, Cheshire, landscape architects set the new development within a structure of woodland and wildflower meadows which brought natural habitats right up to the garden gates of the houses. The designers favoured indigenous species and, in the main, eschewed the planting of exotic ornamental shrubs. This became known in the 1970s as the ‘ecological approach’ and for a time it was fashionable. Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, was a new town large enough to be thought of as a city. Here too there was an ambitiously strategic approach to the landscape plan, with the creation of a linear park system based on river valleys. Different zones of the town were to be differentiated by the character of their planting, so that the town centre would feature horse chestnut, yew, and laurel, while linear parks in the valleys would be replete with willow and dogwood, and the area known as Stantonbury would have lime, birch, and hawthorn. Youngman was involved here too: it was his suggestion that the American-style grid of roads should be softened into a pliable mesh flowing with the landscape. This is not to say that curving streets necessarily make sprawling suburbs acceptable. Developers in the United States have perverted ‘townscape’ approaches by adopting curvilinear patterns which have no relation to topography at all.
No centrally planned new towns have been built in Britain since the 1970s. Conceived in an era of socialist optimism, faith in technology, and enthusiasm for road building, with the private car seen as liberator, the thinking behind these developments now seems dated and flawed in many ways, although supporters of the new town idea would still say that they are a better way of coping with the seemingly insatiable demand for new housing than leaving it to market forces. The notion of new towns has been superseded by talk of eco-cities, and some countries, including China, have started to build them. Even at the time they were built, Britain’s new towns were controversial. When Lewis Silkin, the then Minister of Town Planning, attended a public meeting in Stevenage to announce the designation of England’s first new town, protestors greeted him with cries of ‘Dictator!’ and altered the name of the railway station to ‘Silkingrad’ to make plain their distaste for central planning. A new town, as much as a new motorway or—to take a topical British example—a high speed railway line, is routinely taken as an imposition by local communities and is usually about as welcome as a meteor strike. One of the tasks which landscape architects have taken on is to minimize the disruption caused by such uninvited developments, attempting to blend and harmonize them with the surrounding landscape. This is also the source of the landscape architect’s worst ethical dilemmas: should a practitioner provide landscape advice to smooth the path of a project of which she disapproves?
Any country undergoing technological modernization is going to need a quantity of new infrastructure: roads, railways, airports, reservoirs, dams, factories, power stations, and more. Fitting all of this into the landscape without damaging valued qualities, such as the historic character of the land, the pleasantness of a view, or the richness of flora and fauna in ancient woodland, is a daunting task, but it is one which landscape architects thought they were particularly qualified to take on. Again focusing on Britain as a case study, there are plenty of examples, across a range of developmental sectors.
The energy supply was, and still is, of pressing concern. In 1963, Prime Minister Harold Wilson gave a speech which is now remembered for his embrace of the ‘white heat’ of a technological revolution. One of the technologies Wilson admired was nuclear power, which held out the promise of cheap, readily available electricity. But nuclear power stations are inevitably large buildings and because they need to be away from large centres of population and close to a supply of water for cooling purposes, they have tended to be built on coastal sites, in areas which are not densely populated but are often valued for their scenery. Jellicoe was one of the first landscape architects to make proposals for the setting of one. This was the station at Oldbury-on-Severn, mid-way between Gloucester and Bristol, which he described as ‘a foreign element that is literally monstrous’, in consideration of both its scale and the enormous forces it must contain. This was to be set down in a rural area with an organic pattern of small fields delineated by hedgerows. Jellicoe accepted that there was not much that a landscape architect could do to humanize such a building, but at least he could connect it to its surroundings by designing a landscape which combined the scale of the surrounding fields with the geometries of the reactor buildings. The maquette for the scheme shows a sequence of rectilinear plateaus, reminiscent of the abstract relief paintings of Ben Nicholson, an artist with whom Jellicoe was friendly. Unfortunately, as a result of an underestimate of the soil that would be available, the design could not be completed as intended. Youngman meanwhile became involved with the Central Electricity Generating Board’s controversial plans for a nuclear power station at Sizewell on the Essex coast in 1958. Crowe, similarly, was the landscape consultant for Trawsfynydd nuclear power station, built in Snowdonia National Park in 1959–65. Here she designed the area around the monolithic building to blend harmoniously with the surrounding scenery. She wrote a book entitled The Landscape of Power in 1958 which dealt not only with the matter of siting power stations but also with ways to minimize the visual impact of the power distribution network on the landscape. She never for a moment doubted that this technological infrastructure had to be accommodated. The dust-jacket of her book stated: ‘she accepts the essential need for the construction of immense oil refineries, nuclear reactors, power stations and the network of the electricity grid’.
Landscape architects were also called upon to mitigate the impact of new dams and reservoirs. Crowe worked on the design for Rutland Water, which by surface area is the largest artificial lake in England. It opened in 1976, supplying drinking water to the densely populated East Midlands. She helped to fit the reservoir into the gently rolling landscape, advised on the siting of ancillary buildings, and made specific proposals to deal with the aesthetic problem of ‘draw-down’, the exposure of an unnatural looking shore at times of drought. Gibberd was the landscape consultant for another giant reservoir, Kielder Water in Northumberland, which opened in 1982 and is larger in volume than Rutland Water. It was built in anticipation of an expansion of the steel and petro-chemicals industries in Cleveland which never materialized, but it has ensured that the north of England never suffers from a water shortage, and it is now also valued as a scenic and recreational asset. There was much local opposition to the flooding of the North Tyne valley and this may have given Gibberd more sway over the civil engineers in such matters as the shape of the dam, the materials used for auxiliary structures, and even the grass seed specified for sowing on the completed earthworks.
Kielder Water is surrounded by the country’s largest planted forest. This was created by the Forestry Commission which was charged in the 1920s with the task of creating a strategic timber reserve. The single-mindedness of this goal permitted no consideration of aesthetics or ecology, and the commissioners had no brief to develop the recreational potential of the land in their charge. They planted alien conifers, often Sitka spruce, in serried lines, which marched right up to the limits of their ownership, frequently a straight line on the map. When the commission tried this sort of thing in the Lake District in the 1930s there was a storm of protest, but it was not until 1963 that the Forestry Commission began to employ landscape architects to help plan their plantations. The first consultant they engaged was Crowe, who showed how blocks of planting and felling coups could be designed to harmonize with the topography, using natural features to suggest boundaries, rather than basing them on ownership boundaries. The Countryside Act of 1968 required the Forestry Commission to ‘have regard to the desirability of conserving the natural beauty and amenity of the countryside’. Henceforth forest managers had to ensure that their forests were not just stockpiles of growing timber, but also that they were attractive and welcoming places for visitors, and were much more varied in their species composition, so that they could support a diversity of wildlife.
Any major piece of proposed infrastructure is likely to run into opposition. There is often a struggle between central government, which sees an overriding need for the development, and local groups and communities, which seek to defend the values of an existing landscape. Landscape architects often find themselves in the middle of such battles, usually trying to demonstrate that through their mitigation proposals the project need not be detrimental to the prevailing character of the place. In most cases the landscape architect remains a technocentric outsider, although in recent decades there has been a far greater emphasis upon engaging with extant communities. Of all the infrastructure categories landscape architects work on, perhaps road-building excites the strongest emotions. Colvin was one of the first in Britain to work in this area, serving on the Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads from 1955. In Land and Landscape she promoted the American idea of the ‘fitted highway’—a road that was harmonized with existing contours, rather than blasted through cuttings or elevated on starkly engineered embankments. She was influenced by the American idea of scenic parkways, which were areas within the ‘viewsheds’ of highways—the land that could be seen from the road. Landscape in these areas was protected on aesthetic and environmental grounds, a remarkably sophisticated concept considering that these were created in the early decades of the 20th century. Colvin also thought that a well-designed road could enhance a landscape, and she considered the experience of the driver, who needed to be provided with just the right amount of stimulation to be kept alert. She advised against planting trees too close to the highway to avoid the unpleasant flickering effect that could be caused by sunlight falling through their branches. The Highways Agency, which currently manages England’s strategic road network, still draws upon advice from landscape specialists in the assessment of new routes and the improvement of existing ones. The aim is still to fit roads to their surroundings and use landform and planting to reduce any adverse impacts upon local landscape character.
Of course, if you are hostile to road building on aesthetic or environmental grounds, no well-prepared scheme by a landscape architect is likely to change your mind. Similarly no configuration of artfully contrived earthworks around a reactor building is likely to make anti-nuclear protestors tear up their placards. Individual landscape architects may have crises of conscience when invited to work on proposals for a military airfield or a motorway. One academic opposed to road building labelled landscape architecture ‘the night-soil profession’ because it was so involved in clearing up the messes left by others. Landscape architects often point out to their critics that controversial proposals are likely to go ahead anyway and that it is better that they should do so with the benefit of a designer. The weakness of such arguments is easily shown up by taking an extreme case, let’s say a concentration camp—no amount of aesthetic or ecological finessing could ever make something so morally abhorrent acceptable. This, incidentally, is not such a far-fetched example. As mentioned earlier, many German landscape architects supported the Third Reich. One of them, Wilhelm Hübotter, designed a Teutonic memorial, the Grove of the Saxons, for Heinrich Himmler, which then became a cult site for the SS. After the War he managed to ingratiate himself so well with the victors that he was commissioned to design a memorial for Himmler’s victims on the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony. Some of the landscape architects who helped to harmonize Hitler’s new Autobahnen had also prepared drastic plans for the Germanization of the Polish landscape. It is salutary to remember, once in a while, that landscape architects have not always been on the side of the angels.
Another question that might be asked is whether there is anything dishonest about the screening and camouflaging of infrastructure. This matter was raised by the Californian landscape architect Robert Thayer in his book Gray World, Green Heart: Technology, Nature and the Sustainable Landscape. Thayer argued that we only want to hide our present technology because we are ashamed of it. Hence we try to bury pipes and transmission lines, screen opencast mines, and disguise factories. If we had environmentally sustainable technologies of which we could be proud, he argues, we would want to show them off. Our current technophobia would give way to a happy technophilia. It is an interesting argument and clearly one which involves a cultural shift much broader than anything that can be achieved through landscape architecture alone. The evidence of such a shift is patchy so far. On one hand, there is much cosy enthusiasm for composting and constructed wetlands, on the other, there are bitterly divisive disputes over the siting of wind farms. It seems we have some way yet to go.