International prototypes and local identity: The walled garden of Scotland as heritage landscape

Abstract

The distinctiveness of place is a central, and often unquestioned, tenet of landscape heritage studies and the landscape design and conservation which may accompany them. In learning from history and other comparative studies, one of the many challenges is to discern what determines diversity in the landscape. At what point does the local expression of an international prototype become a local and unique landscape type, a local landscape heritage, in its own right? This paper takes the walled garden of Scotland as an example to explore issues of national, regional and local landscape identities. It examines cultural traditions, biophysical constraints and stylistic responses to availability and command of materials and technologies. It explores some of the origins of the walled garden, the way the landscape type was developed and refined in response to the Scottish context, and the way this element is treated as landscape heritage today.