'All must be adapted to the Genius and the Use of the Place, and the Beauties not forced into it, but resulting from it' (Alexander Pope to Burlington - Epistle IV, 1731)

Landscape Architecture deals with man and land, and the stories they tell about one another. We need to listen to the stories and continue the tale, allowing the memory and imagination of what has gone before to inspire fresh design in the evolving pattern.

‘Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and our memories.’
(VS Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival)

’It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her – the absence of ghosts. 'Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, ‘till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent of which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving sign of their passing and spaces still warm with breath – a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all the names on headstones which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath. They would be the first dead here. It made death that much lonelier, and life lonelier too.’
(David Malouf, Remembering Babylon)

‘The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.’
(Jung)

It is vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires our dreams!’
(Thoreau)

‘While my right hand adjusts the mixer, I stretch out my left and cup it to toss the first splashes on my eyes and wake myself up properly, and as I do so I sense far away the thin, cold, transparent waves flowing towards me along miles and miles of aqueduct across plains valleys mountains, hear the water nymphs from the wellsprings coming towards me along their liquid ways, any moment they’ll be folding me in their threadlike caresses under the shower here…
It occurs to me that the abundance I have been wallowing in until today is precarious and illusory, water could once again become a scarce resource, hard to distribute, the water carrier with his little barrel slung over his shoulder raising his cry to the windows to call the thirsty down to buy a glass of his precious merchandise.’
(Italo Calvino, Introduction to Aqueducts Past & Present)

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?
That he was a hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.’
(James Joyce, Ulysses)

‘The landscape is not seen for itself, but as a commentary upon the human condition, as a speculation upon the tension between order and disorder.’
(JMW Turner)

‘One cannot understand the English landscape and enjoy it to the full, apprehend all its wonderful variety from region to region…without going back to the history that lies behind it.’
(William Hoskins)

‘Are there not inanimate existences, inert things that seem animal, vegetative spirits, statues that dream, and landscapes that think?’
(Flaubert)
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‘The idealised pastoral realm of 'Arcadia' was invented two thousand years ago by Virgil, the supreme poet of urbanity, of the city, of Roman imperialism. You only need Arcadia when your reality is Rome.’
(Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth)

'Even in the knowledge of its inadequacy, pastoral seems to me not a worthless but a necessary myth. It provides a sanctuary in which a bruised mind can rest. It puts a torque on the material concerns of the everyday, twisting them towards something else, some better state. It is a form, in that sense, of idealism, the template on which poetry, or the poetic, can be moulded.’
(Adam Nicolson, Perch Hill)

‘If a society forgets or no longer cares where it lives, then anyone with the political power and the will to do so can manipulate the landscape to conform to certain social ideals or nostalgic visions. People may hardly notice that anything has happened, or assume that whatever happens – a mountain stripped of timber and eroding into its creeks – is for the common good. The more superficial a society’s knowledge of the real dimensions of the land it occupies becomes, the more vulnerable the land is to exploitation, to manipulation for short-term gain.’
(Barry Lopez)

‘….it’s worth spending a great deal of time on the front ends of things, getting the position right….. you can see that ninety percent of our buildings are temporary anyway…. just occupying the ground until the right use is found….We city people should learn to allow our empty sites to lie fallow, like the farmers do their fields, until we know what to do with them. We could even learn to love them in their fallow state.’
( Paul Sheppheard, What is architecture?)

‘I have felt at times, and perhaps this is a kind of delirium, no gap between me and the place. I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have had no existence apart from it. I have been shaped by those island times, and find it difficult now to achieve any kind of distance from them. The place has entered me. It has coloured my life like a stain. Almost everything else feels less dense and less intense than those moments of exposure. The social world, the political world, the world of getting on with work and a career – all those have been cast in shadow by the scale and seriousness of my brief moments of island life.’
(Adam Nicolson, Sea Room)

‘Eagles colour the country they inhabit, but it is a glimpsed presence, not a displayed one.’
(Adam Nicolson, Sea Room)

‘I know this bit of country now. The real pleasure is not in the management, control and decision-making that owning land involves. It is something both less and more than that. I mean the ability to roam in your mind across the surface of a place which is so well known to you that it has become in a sense indistinguishable from who you are. A deeply and properly known stretch of country clamps itself on to your existence like a second skin. It is then, I think, in that marriage of you with your surroundings, that something extraordinary happens.’
(Adam Nicolson, Perch Hill)

‘The valleys are deep and narrow, some wooded, some grassy, some ploughed. The ridges run sharply across the sky, always bare. The rest of the large, sleepy county is marsh or fen or flat farmed plain. These slightly rolling hills appear to be folded out of the earth, but that is not the case; they are part of the dissected tableland. The villages are buried in the valleys, at the end of blind funnels…… Roland who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky with chalk white clouds. Maud noticed good rides and unmended gates, and badly crunched hedgerows, gnashed by machine-teeth.’
(AS Byatt, Possession)

‘The whites couldn’t grasp the fact that for Indians the water was a place, and the great bulk of the surrounding land mere undifferentiated space. The whites had entered a looking glass world, where their own most basic terms were reversed. Their whole focus was directed towards the land: its natural harbours, its timbers, its likely spots for settlement and agriculture. They travelled everywhere equipped with mental chainsaws and at a glance could strip a hill of its covering forest… and there a future of hedges, fields, houses, churches. They viewed the sea as a medium of access to the all-important land.’
(Jonathon Raban, Passage to Juneau)

‘Ruby always seemed to know the compass points and to find them significant, not just when giving directions but even in telling a story…..What was required to speak that language was a picture held in the mind of the land one occupied. Ada knew the ridges and drainages were the frame of it, the skeleton. You learned them and where they stood in relation to each other, and then you filled in the details working from those known marks. General to particular. Everything had a name. To live fully in a place all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail.’
(Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain)

‘She can even smell the rain-lashed erosion of the marble of which she is made.’
(Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover)

‘Forsam et haec olim meminisse juvabit – Perhaps one day even this will be a joy to recall.’
(Virgil)

‘People have often been happy here and the walls have absorbed some of that delight.’
(Adam Nicolson, Sea Room)

‘Reality is a state induced by lack of alcohol.’ (Berlin waiter)
‘Reality is a condition induced by lack of imagination.’ (Kim Wilkie)

‘Grandpa did not always live in the present. Or rather, his present was a layer of several decades that could replace one another with startling rapidity and in no sort of chronological order.’
(David Malouf)

‘If by home one means not four walls and a roof with a fire and a chair before it, but the place of one’s earliest affection, where that handful of men and women may be found who alone in all the world know a little of your wants, your habits, the affairs that come nearest to your heart and who care for them.’
(David Malouf)

‘It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world….We long for place; but place itself longs.
Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. When I saw your jumble of sandals by the door, I saw my parents’ shoes, which after their deaths retained with fidelity not only the shape of their feet, but the way they walked, the residue of motion in the worn leather. Just as their clothes still carried them, a story in a rip, a patch, their long sleeves. Decades stored there in a closet or two. A house, more than a diary, is the intimate glimpse. A house is a life interrupted.’
(Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

‘Instead of seeing nothing but endless tufted green mountains stretching to the horizon, we got airy views of a real, lived-in world: sunny farms, clustered hamlets, clumps of woodland and winding highways, all made exquisitely picturesque by distance. Even an interstate highway, with its cloverleaf interchanges and parallel carriageways, looked benign and thoughtful, like illustrations you used to get in children’s books in my boyhood, showing an America that was busy and on the move, but not too busy to be attractive.’
(Bill Bryson, Walk in the Woods)

‘The walk, as so often with him, immediately becomes symbolic, and the more so as he notes, rock by rock, leaf by leaf, each landmark along the way, re-entering, as it were, the strong net of feelings that for years had lain over these objects. Having for so long retained their power, they now, as he approaches, release it again as if nothing has changed: a line of poplars along a fence, all the trunks black, the leaves bright gold; five stepping stones over a stream, the third of which is not quite firm – and just as he had remembered after nearly sixty years, it tilts underfoot; a lilac bush in a clump of ferns. All the feelings inherent in the landscape come back to me with instant force.’
(David Malouf, Childs Play)

‘In a treeless, winter-hammered landscape like Alaska’s north slope, the light creates a feeling of compassion that is almost palpable. Each minute of light experienced feels like one stolen from a crushing winter. You walk gently about, respectful of flowering plants, with a sense of how your body breaks the sunshine, creating shadow. You converse in soft tones. The light is – perhaps there is no other word – precious. You are careful around it.’
(Barry Lopez, About this life)

‘A specific geographical understanding…….resides with men and women more or less sworn to a place, who abide there, who have a feel for the soil and the history, for the turn of the leaves and night sounds.’
(Barry Lopez)

‘Poetry, Paintings and Gardening, or the science of landscape will forever by Men of Taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn Nature.’
(Horace Walpole 1773)

O lost to honor and the sence of shame
Can Britain so forget Pope’s well earned fame
To desolation doom the poet’s fame
The pride of Twickenhams’s bower and silver Thame’
(Turner’s accompanying lines to his ‘View of Pope’s Villa at Twickenham’ during its dilapidation 1808)

‘I marched the Expedition down the steep and tedious mule path and took up as good a position as I could upon the middle glacier – because Baedeker said the middle part travels the fastest. As a measure of economy, however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts, to go as slow freight. I waited and I waited, but the glacier did not move. Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather- still we did not budge. It occurred to me then, that there might be a timetable in Baedeker; it would be well to find out the hours of starting. I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter. It said, “The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.” I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom had my confidence so wantonly betrayed. I made a small calculation: one inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt 3 1/18 miles. Time required to go by glacier a little over 500 years. The passenger part of this glacier, the central part, the lightning express part, so to speak, was not due in Zermatt till the summer of 2378, and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later…. As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure.’
(Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad)

Numen - definition
"Divine power or spirit, a deity, esp. one presiding locally or believed to inhabit a particular object".