ABSTRACT
The term “landscape” at once refers to scenery, a specific place, and a holistic entity.1 Landscape, as a way of seeing, is based on the historical appropriation of land by select social groups as a means of identifying themselves and their relationship with the locality and other human groups.2 The meaning of landscape as a specific place, which has its roots in the German school of geography beginning in the early 19th century, has changed toward a holistic entity, an indivisible dynamic whole, or a symbolic one, of which the parts can best be understood in terms of processes, both natural and cultural, that incorporate and regulate the whole.3 The aesthetic of landscape design embraces both nature and culture while embodying function, sensory perception, and symbolic meaning.4 Therefore, one’s ability to understand a landscape requires intertwined processes – a complex order of aesthetic and perceptual values that holds across vast scales of time and space.5
