Landscape Philosophy

A Personal Landscape Philosophy

Having worked as a professional consultant in the landscape industry since 1989, and studied the subject throughout that time I am jealously passionate about my profession, and about the value of landscape to humanity.  The immense value of landscape, be it natural or designed is far greater, deeper and wider impacting than is initially evident via an initial perception.

In a world where everything has a cost and nothing has a value landscape is tragically so often the last thing that is considered when it should be the first!  Landscape is wrongly considered as the leftover space between building developments, and the last allocation of financial resource from whatever budget there might have been.  Yet landscape is our primary environment and our connection to planet earth, it is our natural home.  The degradation of our cultures and societies is intrinsically connected to the degradation of our landscapes and living environments.

Landscape is so easily taken for granted, but a simple analysis reveals that all our physical needs come directly or indirectly from the landscape: our food, our water, our clothes, our natural medicines, our building materials, and the air we breathe.  Remove or destroy the complex dynamic of the physical landscape and we die.  It is that basic!  Landscape is however far greater even than this materialistic consideration, our psychological connection to the landscape is most profound: as well as providing for our physical wellbeing, our mental wellbeing is dependent upon the landscape aesthetic.

Beyond our five primary senses of, sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, we connect with landscape aesthetics at a subliminal level.  This connection is almost ethereal, a sixth sense if you like.  The landscape creates a composite, a subliminal dynamic we call the ‘sense of place’, ‘spirit of place’, or genius loci, and we as humans find pleasure, comfort, security and belonging in that place.

The pseudo-science fallacy of the flawed and unfounded theory of evolution is becoming more and more exposed as nonsense in the realms of the empirical sciences: from cosmology to biology and every science in between we can know and begin to accept with a confidence that human life really did began in a garden.  Our desire and love of gardens is a deep ethereal expression of our longing to return to a ‘paradise lost’.  It is our unspoken need to belong and experience our sense of place in the living world.

Landscape is thus much more intrinsic than it is extrinsic and my personal philosophy that drives LandARCHConcepts is centred on creating a meaningful ‘sense of place’ in designed landscapes.  A well-designed meaningful landscape incites positive emotional experiences in the users and Owners of that landscape.  At LandARCHConcepts we aim to create aesthetic spaces that transcend the physical realm to become intimate places.  Good landscape and garden design is not about planting plants or building terraces per se, it is about creating emotional human experiences that have values far greater than capital cost.  A well-designed landscape is the epitome of the Gestalt ethos: the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Landscape and garden design is an investment in your physical and mental wellbeing.  Landscape is genuinely profound.

Graham Sloocmbe BSc(Hons), MHort(RHS) 2018