ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with a variety of approaches: the history of the site itself, the history of the field of landscape in which that site and its history are situated and explained, and the history of peoples' responses, experience, reception of both the site itself and landscape history. A landscape, whether designed, cultural or untouched, does, contain, the materials of its history: the past events and everything else that has happened there and whatever formal cultural interventions have occurred. Knowing how a design came into being must surely be, besides a history of that landscape, also a landscape history. There are many layers to the history of this landscape design. Landscape architects also act as the historians of their own work, by re-telling how the design emerged, how it responded to the site and what its meanings could be. Gardens and landscapes, then, is considered as driven by, and offer evidence of, a whole congeries of human concerns.
