This article studies the industrious strategies that Black farmers in Maryland’s Piedmont pursued before and after the Civil War and the resultant landscapes they created. An examination of antebellum landholdings, demographic patterns, and agricultural production trends demonstrate how free Black farmers leveraged ‘next to nothing’ to provide the foundations of the county’s Black industrious landscapes. In the years immediately following emancipation, additional Black land acquisitions had an importance that was out of scale to their relative paucity: an individual farm could help establish a new settlement. Analysis of agricultural census data, along with investigations of small-scale landscape features such as outbuildings, gardens, and orchards, shows how expanded household production remained a key strategy in the 1870s and 1880s. Black industriousness shaped homesteads, farms, and villages, and Black farming families created distinctive landscapes that endured well into the twentieth century. By embracing the industrious revolution, Black farmers established places of sanctuary and opportunity, in the midst of white hostility. Though these vital places have nearly disappeared from modern maps, Maryland’s Black industrious landscapes matter because they reveal Black farmers were responsible for extending the industrious revolution as it began to fade in other places and for other groups.

A cursory glance at Italian Renaissance gardens reveals that they are populated by the beings of classical mythology. Venus, Apollo, Pegasus, Hercules, … are frozen figures in stone that have come to characterise the iconography of the verdant villas they inhabit. Were they included as devices to narrate myths? Or, did they serve as intricate symbolic ensembles to be decoded like the garden artefacts of the Hypnerotomachi poliphili? I visit these questions in this article (as part of a series on the history of gardens that evoke Greco-Roman myths) by investigating the expression and reception of Renaissance topomythopoeic gardens through the eyes of a contemporary chronicler of gardens, Bartholomeo Taegio (1520–1573). Extracts from his dialogue, La Villa (1559), are used throughout to frame a general discussion of Renaissance topomythopoiesis: the rhetoric of the locus amoenus and Parnassus, the appropriation of statues, and Neoplatonic reception and conception. Whereas the gods survived the Christian Middle Ages as beings that animated the ekphrastic language of landscape (and seldom adorned emblematic fountains) there emerged in sixteenth-century Italy a trend to concretise their presence. Yet, as Taegio’s account shows, not everyone encountered these as stories to be read or hidden codes to be deciphered.

This article seeks to shed new light on the reality of Persian gardens by examining them as a trajective reality, being formed through a set of continuous and ongoing exchanges with various human and natural elements constituting its environment. More particularly, it aims to highlight the process of reciprocal engendering that existed between the garden and the worldview of traditional Iranian society. In this way, it shows how the Persian garden is not only the imprint of the cosmology of the Iranian people but also, insofar as it unfolds a certain world, reciprocally its matrix. A content analysis as well as the study of several cases have allowed the identification of three types of relationship between the garden and the world of the ancient Persians through which they co-construct one another. These are: analogy, enrichment and complementarity. Finally, this study explores the importance of the building of such relationships in contemporary landscape design.

This study analyses Song dynasty garden documents and paintings and identifies three methods to create mountain-viewing experiences in private gardens. The landscaping techniques, aesthetic sensibilities, and cultural implications of each method are discussed, and the evolution of the mountain-viewing tradition is examined. Due to changes in natural conditions and the influence of royalty, mountains and stones as garden design elements held greater significance under the Southern Song dynasty than the Northern Song dynasty, with marked changes in mountain-building techniques, appreciation of stones, aesthetic preferences, and the professional esteem of designing gardens. Mountain-viewing pavilions became more prevalent during the Southern Song dynasty because the Song people deeply revered scholar Tao Yuanming. This paper contributes to Chinese landscaping history literature by showing how and why the mountain-viewing trend grew and how the Song dynasty influenced garden landscaping in China.

This article examines the emergence and development of playgrounds in the most significant treaty ports of China — Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Tianjin — during the first half of the 20th century. It contributes to understanding the unique evolution of playgrounds and children’s play in modern China by exploring the interaction between imported ideas from the endogenous development of playgrounds in Europe and America and new ideas on children’s development with local circumstances and social ideas. It reveals that initially, children’s play was mainly adult-oriented, but after certain ideas on safety, education, and physical development were introduced, playgrounds were constructed. Later, physical constructions and management methods were added until they developed into particular landscapes that were constructed to meet the perceived physical, social, and mental needs of children. During this process, urban citizens changed their ideology on play, viewing playgrounds as a tool for training children to conform to society.

This paper examines the Garden of Mount Yu in the late Ming Dynasty, owned by the prestigious scholar-official and drama critic Qi Biaojia. As seen in his literature on Mount Yu, Qi had projected his theatrical sensitivity onto his viewing of the garden, imagining the emotional interactions between his ‘theatrical self’ and the garden, which emerged again on the night of his martyrdom upon Ming’s collapse. In both circumstances, the alienation of a ‘theatrical self’ enabled Qi to immerse himself in the imagined theatrics while apprehending their illusory quality. This paper takes the nocturnal obscurity and mutability of temporal stages as opposites of daytime normality and demonstrates the obsession with theatricality and its manipulation in seventeenth-century China. Such obsession, when examined in the context of the Ming-Qing transition, reflects a philosophy of living in the post-conquest world, wherein the significance of a garden was highlighted.

Ancient Chinese civilization was deeply rooted in a profound understanding of the environment. This understanding formed the primitive worship and unique culture of mountains and rivers, which found expression in both official and folk contexts. This essay delves into the significant influence of mountains and rivers on the site selection, positioning, and composition of ancient Chinese settlements. Through an in-depth analysis of cases, this study demonstrates that iconic mountain and river elements served as the foundation for determining the spatial locations of ancient Chinese settlements and the core references for designed landscapes. The settlement and surrounding mountains and rivers form a well-conceived integrated spatial composition, which threads the whole planning and construction process. As the determining factors for the spatial axes and forms of settlements, mountains and rivers also became the central objects of the feng shui theory. Therefore, the human geography of ancient China is not only a reflection of functions but also the result of the builders’ diligent pursuit of spatial and cultural layouts. The study of the cultural genes allows for a deeper understanding of the cultural landscape of ancient China, leading to a commitment to protecting traditional settlements and their intact environmental systems.

The UNESCO World Heritage Site of West Lake, in Hangzhou, China, also is a human-made lake managed since the ninth century CE to maintain selected ecological functions and visual integrity. Using perspectives of cultural and political ecology to examine historical data, we explore the ecosystem services of West Lake and management strategies to maintain these services at different governance levels over five broad periods. Results indicate that West Lake provided varying key ecosystem services to Hangzhou over time. Cultural services, such as recreation and tourism, began to replace provisional services and today are the most important contributions of the site. National, regional, and local policies directly and indirectly enhanced and undermined different ecosystem services over time. The perspectives of cultural and political ecology help understand strategies of creating and guiding long-term change of a managed landscape, providing important implications for sustaining future ecosystem services.

It seems inconceivable for a garden in China (or a Chinese garden elsewhere) not to feature bamboo, serving a variety of aesthetic, practical, and metaphoric purposes. This paper offers both a translation of a set of some of the most famous celebrations of the bamboo, in prose and poetry, from the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) down to the late imperial period, and a discussion of the role of this particular plant in the design and life of the Chinese garden and the levels of symbolic meaning it brings to these gardens.