ABSTRACT
In 1789 Daniel Boone told a friend that he was leaving Kentucky for “some point beyond the bounds of civilization and spend the remnant of my days in the woods.” Penniless from his failed business of digging ginseng root, Boone complained that civilization appeared to him as “nothing more than improved ways to overreach your neighbor.” But Boone did not vanish into the wild. Americans have often regarded the national terrain as infused with special significance, a kind of physical epistle from God to the nation. For newcomers to America, colossal monuments like Rushmore may signal the capacity of size and natural setting to establish their presence. The intermingling of nature and culture in American landscapes has also incorporated non-Western influences such as the Zen garden; this sometimes appears in botanical settings as at Brooklyn’s Botanical Garden, which includes a garden modeled on Kyoto’s Ryoanji.
