The Landscape Garden as Material Culture: Lessons from France

Abstract

Landscapes or built environments contain distinct lessons about material culture and human life. Land that shows the effects of human activity constitutes material culture, but is often less clearly bounded than other cultural objects and it is also more vividly intertwined with nature. This article explores the landscape garden as material culture. It exists everywhere that the earth and social communities meet: fields opened by deforestation, piles of sludge in the ruins of old manufacturing centres, empty lots in cities, windmills along a ridge, and others. These meeting places of nature and human labour are, like other forms of material culture, created for social purposes and designed to have value. In landscape history, there have been a number of schools of thought, touching on this issue. This article cites examples from gardens across the world especially Europe to elaborate on the importance of landscape gardens as material culture and also draws a similarity between the two which concludes this article.