ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the idea that environmental awareness was partly an outcome of life in the home, given the expansion of British cities in the nineteenth century. The interpretation of images and patterns of natural order found in literature were paralleled by techniques for introducing elements of novelty in the house and garden in a controlled manner. In the house, like the garden, colour was important in organizing furnishings, wall and floor coverings and ornaments. A sensitivity to colour placed renewed emphasis on the observer of landscape features as the active interpreter of the scenic characteristics of building sites. In visiting botanical gardens at home, the British found novel settings as bounded and packaged for the viewer as those in the accounts of Victorian explorers to distant islands and dark continents. An understanding of habitat, however partial or intuitive, informed a particular way of reading domestic surroundings.
