Pruned: Landscape Hints Annotated

Discovered recently are these digitized before-and-after landscape illustrations of Humphry Repton, the prolific and influential English landscape designer of the 18th and 19th centuries, taken from what must be the only complete online facsimile of his important texts.

A quick word about these two images, for they are hilarious. The landscape alteration here does not involve physical changes but rather just the addition of livestock — farm animals as decorative elements to transform the English countryside into a mythical Romantic idyll.

Or you add some sheep.

One wonders if the direct descendent of this pastoral tradition is the current vogue of visualizing landscapes adaptively reused for the coming climate-changed, post-oil, post-water world. And here we’re thinking of Farmadelphia, Chicken Wing, Animal Messaging Service, etc. — landscapes which are populated by a new breed of Henry David Thoreaus.

Flip over the digital flap and you find Romantic hero-ecologists practicing an imagined earlier sustainable way of life adopted for an aestheticized vision of the future.

(Spotted by gardenhistorygirl.)

Plinius said…

Good spot, Arcady. There’s a memorable Repton quote in John Brewer’s ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (p629). Repton said that landscape was about “appropriation… that charm which only belongs to ownership, the exclusive right of enjoyment, with the power of refusing that others should share our pleasure.” He didn’t mince his words, did he?!