The roots of environmental aesthetics reach back to the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers who found nature an ideal source of aesthetic experience. Today, having blossomed into a significant subfield of aesthetics, environmental aesthetics studies and encourages the appreciation of not just natural environments but also human-made and human-modified landscapes. Nature and Landscape is an important introduction to this rapidly growing area of aesthetic understanding and appreciation. Allen Carlson begins by tracing the development of the field's historical background, and then surveys contemporary positions on the aesthetics of nature, such as scientific cognitivism, which holds that certain kinds of scientific knowledge are necessary for a full appreciation of natural environments. Carlson next turns to environments that have been created or changed by humans and the dilemmas that are posed by the appreciation of such landscapes. He examines how to aesthetically appreciate a variety of urban and rural landscapes and concludes with a discussion of whether there is, in general, a correct way to aesthetically experience the environment.

Based upon the best-selling book Architectural Detailing by Edward Allen and Patrick Rand, Landscape Architectural Detailing applies the same organization to the three major concerns of the landscape architecture detailer—function, constructability, and aesthetics. Richly illustrated, this book approaches landscape architecture detailing in a systematic manner and provides a framework for analyzing existing details and devising new ones. Landscape Architectural Detailing includes material on details related to aesthetics, water drainage and movement, structures, construction assemblies, sustainable resources, and more.

Planting design is, rather obviously, a complex topic, spanning as it does art, science, social need, and morality--especially during these days of increasing planetary environmental threat. Although certainly not denying the importance of scientifically appropriate practices, the symposium "The Aesthetics of [Contemporary] Planting Design" addressed planting design today, proposing a renewed concern for the cultural and aesthetic aspects of the landscapes that result. This book, which has been developed from the original presentations at the symposium, presents the thoughts of a select international group of landscape architects and historians who discuss the subject of planting design through the lens of their own work as well as the work of others, both contemporary and historical. They suggest that, as in real estate, the most important factor in selecting plants is "location, location, location." Certainly the Californian situation is far more forgiving than the aridity and other restrictive environmental conditions endemic to the Sonoran desert, or the frost and short growing seasons of Nordic lands that direct Scandinavian landscape architects to rely on native birches, pines, rowan, and moss. Most of us would agree that there are plants sensible for each climatic zone. Addressing environmental conditions is but the first step in the equation, however. There are also the issues of combination and composition.

Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time 'beyond' modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds.

How do people react to the visual character of their surroundings? What can planners do to improve the aesthetic quality of these surroundings? Too often in environmental design, visual quality--aesthetics--is misunderstood as only a minor concern, dependent on volatile taste and thus undefinable. Yet a substantial body of research indicates the importance of visual quality in the environment to the public and has uncovered systematic patterns of human response to visual attributes of the built environment. Efforts to understand environmental aesthetics have been undertaken by investigators from such diverse fields as landscape architecture, environmental psychology, geography, philosophy, architecture, and city planning. As a result the relevant information is scattered and not readily available to professionals and policy makers. The book brings together classic and new contributions by distinguished workers in different disciplines. It explores theory and data on preferences in the visual environment, and also addresses the practical application of aesthetic criteria in design, planning and public policy. Promising directions for future research are identified.