What is Landscape?

by John R. Stilgoe

Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: "landschop." Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as "landskep," which became " landskip," then "landscape," designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In "What Is Landscape?" Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. ("What is that?" "Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...") He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries. What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills -- icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin "silvaticus "(people of the woods) to coin the word "savages"; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.

Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise -- to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.

Genres: Nature, Landscape Architecture, Science, History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art

264 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2015

About the author

John Stilgoe is an award-winning historian and photographer who is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at the Visual and Environmental Studies Department of Harvard University, where he has been teaching since 1977. He is also a fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was featured on a Sixty Minutes episode in 2004 entitled "The Eyes Have It."

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stilgoe is a bit repetitive, a bit arch, always wandering and... distant, it feels. Still, there's much here that valuable and interesting. Organizationally, I feel like reputation has trumped clarity. But intelligence permeates each chapter with a soft haze of welcome. You feel like you're chasing Stilgoe down paths that he's already walked and forgotten. Terms are bolded to be defined but seem sometimes disorganized, the way a pebble on a beach will wash up fresh and bright in the sun and then, after a wave crosses it, reappear somewhere else, equally bold to the eye.

At the end of the day, I think Stilgoe is probably a better beachwalker than anything else: his governing structure appears to be the child's sandcastle even as he makes a strong case for "landscape studies" in its own right as a practical academic field of close observation. Perhaps most hearteningly, Stilgoe constantly phrases his observations from the perspective of local argots and perspectives, then of linguistic history and etymologies; he resists the top-down cartography of imperial mapmaking. Whether or not that is an affectation presumed on his academic elitism and privilege I leave to another to answer.

Here's something that I wished I'd have read first. It comes at the end of the book.

Just as the sea is always whispering (or crashing loudly, perhaps swashing), so the inquirer into essential landscape discovers that landscape whispers too, not always clearly, often in old or ancient or dialect words, sometimes in ones not in new dictionaries. Where people shaped or shape land adjacent to tide water provides some of the richest vocabulary, but in the end, or at the edge of the end, essential landscape and landscape terminology reveal a lone fact.

Landscape is fragile. And the climate changes now, as it did when Dunwich drowned. Anyone who notices understands what children on the beach learn as the tide reaches for sandcastles. Natural forces still rule, even over castles.

At the edges things clash and merge. One way of beginning a lifelong avocation is to look closely at the beach, then the alongside landscape, to wonder at docks and yards and paths, to ask always the names of what comes to mind as one walks slightly inland, to look under bridges, to walk in the dark, to ask about colour, to think always about what it means to fly as contemporary airline passengers fly, not as teenagers once flew, to find lunch and remember that the food came from a farm, usually a farm in fly-over land, and to think always of home and whatever home means.

So there you have it. I hope that's helped.

[Howard Mansfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

We live in northern New England on eight acres. Some of that land is woods – or call it forest – along a brook (and call that a stream or a creek in different parts of the country). A few acres are “open” fields – or pasture or meadow. We tend to call it a field or a pasture – sheep do graze there every year. But what are the correct terms for the different parts of these few acres? And what did the old Yankees years ago used to call the woods and fields? I’m sure they had many distinctions now lost to us.

The language we use to describe the landscape changes. This is one of the many lessons from Stilgoe’s excellent What is Landscape? He seeks out the etymological roots for words like landscape and wilderness, touring old Norse, Dutch, Norman and Frisian, among other languages.

What is Landscape? will show readers how thin their landscape language is, and how lacking are the Google Maps and GPS we use today.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite what I thought it would be, but brilliant for all that. Written by someone as unusual as an academic who doesn't take himself – or his discipline – too seriously, while effortlessly exuding lashings of knowledge.

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 4 out of 5]

A more accurate title of this book might be: The Etymology and Lexicography of Landscape Terms. Despite the misleading title, this book was a delight to read. Sometimes it felt almost like reading a collection of limericks. Very British, and, unfortunately, very anthropocentric.

One omission that I find both surprising and unfortunate is the near lack of any acknowledgement of how the ecology of non-human lifeforms contributes to building landscape. This topic could fill the pages of an entire book I think. It would include everything from the beaver and its dam, apex predators (see the reintroduction of the Gray Wolf in Yellowstone National Park and the profound effects this had on the landscape), to the pollination of flowering plants by insects and birds, to the dispersal of seeds by extinct megafauna (see the avocado, the Osage orange, and the giant Ground Sloth), to the paths created over thousands of years by large groups of migrating animals and the trails that prehistoric and indigenous hunting societies created by following these migrations, trails that, in some cases, would eventually be paved and become the foundation for modern interstate highways.

[Simon Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is Landscape is a passionate call for inquiring minds to humbally explore, on foot, that significant proportion of the earth's surface that has been touched by man's presence. The humility comes from learning from locals: those who live and perhaps work on the land who use language to describe it that might not be found in any modern dictionary. I found the relationship between landscape and wilderness particularly interesting: the natural rewilding that came after the Black Death when the forests quickly returned but brought with them anarchy and disorder for the survivors, with brigands lurking in a dark Tolkienesque world- a far cry from from what we perceive to be safe and regulated national parks today. It was a hard read at times but one that I'm very pleased I undertook.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A small amount was good, more than that and the style got tedious and then annoying.

[Danny Mindich · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating, wild, and deceptively applicable to modern life. and ancient life and animal/plant life. lovely source of true wisdom

[Laçin Tutalar · Rating 2 out of 5]

A tiring book, an overwhelming lexical effort. Stories usually help me make sense of word origins, making process central. I love a smart etymological move when the author finds the ground to use it. But here such stories are nervous, cut-short, and they care to stay on the surface even though all those etymological links deceptively give the impression that we are diving into a sea of connections with these spatial forms. Chapter 6 has been kind of upsetting to read, by the way, since this chapter on 'farm' wanted to obsess with the American farm and landscape, neglecting more living stories of farms and landscapes with the rest of the world.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stilgoe is clearly a very intelligent person. The vast etymological research alone is noble, yet overwhelming. Given the title, I thought this would be much more accessible. I am an architect yearning to learn more about landscape theory and design thinking. However, this book is more driven toward connecting a multi-cultural landscape lexicon. Which is admirable, but certainly not what I hoped the book would be. There is an excellent quote about "Journalizing" and made mention of "Trails through leaves" which I am reading next. So I am thankful for that direction.