THINKING ABOUT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Stewardship is the commitment to the responsible overseeing, management, and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving, such as riparian streams, cultural landscapes, and lands crucial to maintaining the integrity of open space and wildlife habitat. In the United States, landscape architects have formalized a variety of stewardship tenets through policies adopted and promulgated through the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). One of the organization’s stated policies that reflects the stewardship responsibility inherent in the profession is a policy on the preservation of landscapes associated with wildlife and wildlife habitat. Landscape architects, as a profession, extend stewardship concerns and responsibilities to urban, rural, and natural areas. Cultural and historical sites and landscapes are acknowledged to have an intrinsic value and require a stewardship stance, as the ASLA does in its policy on historic and cultural resources of the nation, state, and local jurisdictions. By logical extension, one way that landscape architects can carry out their stewardship responsibility is by applying lessons learned from the process advocated first by Frederick Law Olmsted in the nineteenth century and later in the mid-twentieth century by Ian McHarg. McHarg elegantly argued in his book Design with Nature (1970) for a systematic approach to assess the suitability of land resource allocation to accommodate human uses and development.
Design with Nature Landscape architects often derive inspiration for their designs from their experiences and observations of nature. The nature-inspired designs are rarely a direct appropriation of forms and compositions experienced in actual nature. Naturalistic landscape designs seem to move in cycles of favor and relevance among landscape architects, or from the way one landscape architect “works” as opposed to other forms of artistic expression (formal or abstract, for instance). Designed landscapes informed from nature are often referred to as naturalistic designs. This is a term with a broad meaning with many variations. Naturalistic designs are composed with forms (compositional arrangements) and materials (the use of materials taken directly from nature such as native plant species and building materials). Landscape designs appropriated or inspired from nature are rarely direct copies but rather are abstractions, symbolic, or interpretations although artistic intent may result in some ambiguity. The viewer might be compelled to ask: “Is the landscape natural or not?” The designs of traditional gardens of China and Japan were created with the intent of realizing an abstraction, even a miniaturization of nature. While natural-looking, these gardens are filled with symbols composed of plants and arrangements of rocks placed to represent other places (sacred or admired) or animals such as birds. The creation of naturalistic gardens is a tradition steeped in Western culture, including the Romantic gardens of Northern Europe and North America. Nature became the fountainhead of theory and approach to landscape planning and design in the latter half of the twentieth century in an approach referred to as design with nature. 20
