The sustaining beauty of productive landscapes

Abstract

Elizabeth Meyer influentially argues that aesthetic dimensions, in particular beauty, are a vital component of landscape architecture's capacity to create sustainable environments. In her presentation of a successful exemplar of ‘Sustaining Beauty’, Orongo Station, an Aotearoa New Zealand farm designed by North American landscape architect Thomas Woltz, this article identifies four factors that constrain landscape architecture's relevance in terms of sustainable design. It then offers, as an alternative manifesto, a generative programme for both Orongo Station and the wider discipline of landscape architecture. It incorporates challenges of provenance, identity, experimentation, and farm-to-plate-to-farm logistics: suggesting opportunities to not only sustain landscape, but for landscape—in its connective, instrumental, practised, and scalable sense—to better sustain us.