The Pattern of Landscape (Applied ecology, landscape and natural resource management series)

In different countries and at different times in history, men have looked at the landscape in various ways. It has been their home, their enemy, their God, their working partner or a storehouse to be plundered.
All these attitudes to the environment can be found in the world today.
But there is also a dangerously superficial attitude which looks on landscape as if it were a picture, unchanging and independent of the forces which influence it, a backcloth rather than a part of life. Historically, this attitude is recent and perhaps derives from the great numbers of articulate people who now look at landscapes without working or living in them.
Sylvia Crowe, quoted above in her introduction to The Pattern of Landscape, is emphatically not of those numbers of people, for she has looked at, lived with and worked on landscape all her life. In this perceptive and immensely readable book, Dame Sylvia has distilled that lifetime s experience to analyse both the acceptable and the detestable features of the landscape we live in. Her book, therefore, is about interpretation, and will appeal to the growing number of people in landscape or heritabe conservation, as well as to landscape architects and applied ecologists.