Welcome to landscaping's Member Page

See my Clippings See my Journal See my trade list

I can think of no better way to introduce myself than by providing the following remark. For, in providing it, I illustrate how much admire both literature and landscaping -- especially when the two can be fused together.

I urge the like-minded to read Edgar Allan Poes "The Domain of Arnheim." In this work Poe delivers an interesting insight into the "philosophy of landscape design," if you will.

Poe was fascinated by the perception that, while the beauty of this or that component in nature is considered to be inimitable, humans can actually improve upon nature when it comes to the composition of the individual components. This perception applies both to landscape painting and landscape design. Poe marvels that:

"[N]o such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess -- many excesses and defects. While the component parts may defy, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of these parts will always be susceptible of improvement. In short, no position can be attained on the wide surface of the natural earth, from which an artistical eye, looking steadily, will not find matter of offence in what is termed the composition of the landscape."

Using rocks and vines, water and trees, Poe would like the ideal landscape designer to approach what landscape *painters* had achieved using paints on a canvas....