9 Books for 90 Years of Landscape

A personal take on the best and most relevant books on landscape published over the past ninety years

By Jo Phillips, Manchester Metropolitan University

A list like this is bound to create disputes. Of course, any suggestion that all readers of this journal might cherish the same set of favourite books about landscape would be preposterous. Still, my first strategy was to ask around colleagues and peers to see what books they would choose, were they in my position. Nobody agreed.

A couple sent me their many choices, which were almost entirely different from each other. Some refused to name a single text that they would recommend. One said that she did not read books. In the face of this dearth of help, I decided on strategy number two; to compile a purely personal list, in chronological order, influenced by my experiences and interests, by tutors and students at MMU, and also, I think, by the city I happened to be in at the time of writing (Brasilia). I hope there are some things here that you have read and loved, and others that you will enjoy discovering.

Colour Schemes in the Flower Garden, Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll’s Colour Schemes in the Flower Garden is still relevant to students of the aesthetics of planting design. It first came out in 1908 and has been reprinted throughout the last ninety years. Originally entirely in black and white, this book gives us so much more than pictures. She notices all; the preference for Verbascum in ‘the subdued light of a cloudy morning’, the hue of a scarlet geranium that is ‘pure and brilliant, but not cruel’. She describes her own garden with great care, humbly taking in the harmonious whole and the details of her ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ whilst noting that the ‘desired point always seems to elude attainment’.

Jekyll advises us on how to look at plants in context. I find I am happy to be so clearly directed; her way of grouping daffodils is ‘the prettiest way to have them’ and Delphiniums are ‘indispensable for July’. Although it is usefully structured as a practical manual, her writing is all about the subtlety, close observation and artistic judgement of working with plants; ‘The business of a blue garden is to be beautiful as well as to be blue…just as blue as may be consistent with its best possible beauty’. She wants plants to be used with intention, so that ‘gardening may rightly claim to rank as a fine art’. In common with others on this list, her writing expresses a love of process. Her plants are observed and tended through ‘constant change’; she muses on how to make a woodland and a garden ‘join hands’. This book is all about modifying the dynamic relationships between things, and what does a student of landscape need to understand more than this?

The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd

Written in the 1940s but not published until 1977, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the story of a whole life lived in the Cairngorms. Her writing is pure energy; the mountain range is ‘a mass of granite thrust up, split, shattered and scoped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water’. She speaks plainly of the ‘lust for a mountain top’ and she is ‘mad to recover the tang of height’. Her experience is truly elemental, and this is a book with plenty of deadly peril, skinny dipping and the ‘horror of walking in mist’. For Nan, it is an entirely mutual relationship and the mountain gives itself to her most completely when she goes out with no destination in mind, but just ‘to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’. It is rich and intense with emotion; fear, delight, contentment, love, triumph, amazement. She describes an ultimate embodied experience, written so that we smell the savour of the pine, feel the mountain air in her lungs and the heather under her bare feet; ‘as I penetrate more deeply in to the mountain’s life I am beyond desire… I’m not out of myself, but in myself, I am’. This is one to be read from start to finish in one sitting, ideally on a mountain top, with feet in an icy burn and warm heather under your back.

The Making of the English Landscape, W.G Hoskins

First published in 1955, The Making of the English Landscape by historian W.G Hoskins has been published in at least 35 editions. Crucially, mine is the 1988 version with commentary by Christopher Taylor. Hoskins eulogises about the landscape and wants us to appreciate that landscape is woven from many elements and processes in the past. Ironically, he does not approve of any of those processes that have had landscape impacts after the industrial revolution, which he thinks has ‘ravished, poisoned and fouled’ the countryside. Taylor’s extensive annotations are essential, as they are frequently point out that Hoskins’ interpretation of a landscape feature ‘is no longer true’, or even ‘far from the truth’, as he points out the extent of uncertainties about various historical ‘facts’. It could be said that Hoskins is reactionary, conservative, inaccurate and opinionated in his view of the English landscape as having been ‘completed’ before 1914 and only corrupted after, since when ‘every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning’. He is simply wrong in his idea that ‘most of England is a thousand years old’. But still, what a cracking read. If you prefer your history accurate and balanced, you would be better off with Francis Pryor’s The Making of the British Landscape (2010) instead. If, like me, you enjoy an outrageously biased and emotional account, then give this one a chance.

Townscape, Gordon Cullen

Townscape by Gordon Cullen (1961) is surely one of the less controversial books on this list. It is enticingly simple, with the aim of creating a ‘collective surplus of enjoyment’ in which buildings are brought together and ‘an art other than architecture is made possible’. Only occasionally esoteric, he writes plainly of ‘bigness’, ‘thereness’, and, like Jekyll, the ‘art of relationship’. His proposed ‘serial vision’ of the pedestrian as they weave their way through the city streets has been important in getting us away from visualising everything in terms of a spatial plan, fixed in time. Cullen calls for us to reach out to the public emotionally, with ‘an environment that chats away happily, plain folk talking together’, and his drawings and photographs help to deliver his message with great clarity. You may not agree with him on every point, for example the photo of a small public lavatory does not, for me, ‘sum up the functional vigour of expression’. But you must admire his attention to cathedrals and bollards, cooling towers and slot drains, lighthouses and ‘the dramatic scenery of the floor’. Against boredom, monotony and uniformity of all kinds, he was probably a great guy to talk to at parties.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is a long book, and brilliantly unillustrated (‘For illustrations, please look closely at real cities’) and still it often crops up in conversation. Its central concern is understanding how citizens create cities, through an essential dynamic web of ‘physical-economic-ethical’ processes. She thinks that good people get caught up in the ways of thinking encouraged by bad planning systems. She finds the North End of Boston, for example, to be vibrant, healthy, well-kept and cheerful, the epitome of her ideal ‘intricate and close-grained diversity’, but her planner friend calls it a ‘terrible slum’ because of the apparent chaos of the street life. She doesn’t mince her words about Le Corbusier, or about Ebenezer Howard, who ‘proposed really very nice towns if you were docile…and didn’t mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own’. She asks plain questions, like ‘what makes a city street well-used or shunned?’ and, like Cullen, she is concerned about urban monotony. Ahead of its time, the book discusses advances in the understanding of ‘organized complexity’ which she says is the essential nature of the problem of cities. Only when she refers to computers as the ‘new mechanical brains’ am I reminded that this book is nearly sixty years old.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972) is, however, perhaps the most ageless book on this list. You are probably familiar with the premise; Kublai Khan, emperor of the Tartars, listens to the young Marco Polo describing the many cities of the Empire that he has visited – or so it seems at first. To Khan, the Empire seems ‘an endless, formless ruin’, which he is desperate to learn of, never having visited these places himself. Some of the cities are desperate and dark, like Zobeida, where men corner fleeing women in the streets. Others are surprising and witty, like Sophronia, where the city is in two sectors. One half, of fairgrounds and circuses, is permanent and the other half, where banks, hospitals and factories are found, is itinerant for months of the year. My own favourite is Octavia, the spiderweb city that hangs by a net over a deep chasm, and where the inhabitants know for certain that the net ‘will only last so long’. It is perhaps best not to hear too much about this incredibly rich and puzzling little book before you read it. It is wonderful while travelling, and you can take what you want from it. Perhaps the most essential book on this list; you need your own copy to dip into whenever feeling uninspired.

Landscape and Englishness, David Matless

In his preface to the 2016 edition of Landscape and Englishness (first ed. 1998), written just before the Brexit referendum, David Matless notes the influence of UKIP in ‘trading in Englishness’ and taking it to the political right. He aims to trace the genealogy of ‘liberalism and conservatism, tolerance and anxiety, individualism and patriotism’ through his critique of landscape. It is an incredibly thorough and well-informed chronological account, through music, politics, poetry, television and all manner of other cultural sources, starting long after Hoskins has lost interest. It’s intensely informative, but not without entertainment, for example in describing the promotion of ‘outdoorsy’ health and fitness, exploring the organic movement via the rhetoric of Nazi Germany and a George Formby song about a nudist camp. He mentions the founding of the ‘Institute of Landscape Architects’ in 1929 and refers to Sylvia Crowe’s optimistic definition of our practice as ‘an ordering modernism, resolving any contradictions of the natural and new’. If you are after a wider reading list, then this book should be your first stop; the bibliography runs to over one hundred pages.

The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Charles Waldheim

The Landscape Urbanism Reader, a collection of essays edited by Charles Waldheim, was published in 2006. I do realise that it is probably not a book that you will be taking to the beach this summer. Based around the concerns of decentralised cities, abandonment of land, de-densification and toxicity, its contributors continue some of the themes of Jacobs and frequently reference Ian McHarg. The first essay in the collection, James Corner’s celebrated Terra Fluxus, focuses on urban infrastructural landscapes and is about designing ‘relationships between dynamic environmental processes and urban form and breaking down the binary oppositions of nature and city. For Corner, the processes of urbanization are much more significant than are the spatial forms, and he aspires to landscape architecture escaping from marginalisation as a mere ‘decorative practice’. Other chapters discuss landscape architecture as an ‘ecological art of instrumentality’ (Richard Weller), landscape as infrastructure underlying other urban systems (Elizabeth Mossop) and the reuse of ‘Drosscapes’ (Alan Berger). It is an important book, worth wrestling with and impossible to do justice to here.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane

The inclusion of Robert Macfarlane on this list should not come as a surprise to anyone. In The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot (2013), Macfarlane writes frankly beautiful prose about ‘landscape and the human heart…and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move’. His focus here is paths, which are ‘the habits of landscape acts of consensual making’. He walks the Broomway, a public right of way off the Essex coast which has killed more than a hundred people with quicksand and galloping tides, without a guide. Macfarlane is advised that if it is misty when he turns up at the start of the path he had better not go. It is. He goes anyway, past the sign saying ‘do not approach or touch any object as it may explode and kill you’. As he walks out to sea he finds his body and mind become almost indivisible form the landscape, so that for days afterwards he feels ‘calm, level, shining, sand flat. On the Isle of Lewis he walks barefoot, sometimes finding sphagnum moss and sometimes miniature gorse. He observes seal, terns, golden eagles. He walks with his friend Raja in the West Bank, ‘trying to understand politics by the means of geology’ and on the sacred Minya Konka mountain in Tibet, recalling past episodes of altitude sickness ‘like a pig-iron helmet’. He finishes at Formby Point, a place local to me. Like him, I have been enthralled by the 5000-year-old footprints of people, aurochs, boar and birds in the repeatedly-uncovered strata of silt halfway up the beach and felt the ‘unsettling power’ of these trails, the sense of co-presence, intimacy and remoteness that they bring.

Dr Jo Phillips is Associate Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Manchester Metropolitan University.