ABSTRACT
The naturalist and writer, John Burroughs, was fascinated as his Atlantic crossing brought him to Glasgow. The subdued, domesticated landscape, seen from the Clyde estuary, was the outcome of ‘many centuries of enlightened dedicated husbandry’. It looked so unlike what he had seen in the Hudson river valley (Renehan, 1992, pp145–146). So too were attitudes. Whereas American romanticists idealized the sublimity of distant wilderness, Europeans focused much more upon the cultural landscape of buildings, settlement and the countryside of everyday life. Whereas the frontier was held to have shaped the American character, it was the immediate and familiar which nurtured and sustained what was perceived to be essentially German, French and English temperaments. England was recalled for ‘the beauty of a land that has been lived in for generations’ – for its fields and copses, and cottages around the village green (Gardner, 1942, p1). Such focus upon the home area made for a less dichotomous view of nature and culture. Nature was not some separate refuge from everyday ills, but a component part of the immediate rural landscape. The priority was not to find some compensatory nature for what had been lost, but rather to cherish what was already possessed (Ditt, 1996, pp12–14; Lekan, 2004, pp15–16).
