ABSTRACT
In late 1996, during the discussions which led to the republication of Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, the deaths were reported of the American landscape essayist J. Brinckerhoff Jackson and the British landscape architect and writer Geoffrey Jellicoe. Both Jackson and Jellicoe were figures of huge significance in twentieth-century English-language landscape writing. They have deeply influenced my own thinking about landscape, and I count myself fortunate in having met and heard each of them speaking on landscape. In their different ways, both were acutely sensitive to the complexities and ambiguities, as well as to the expressive power, that actual landscapes embody. Each recognized and honored in his writings and designs a desire to sustain what I refer to in this book as an unalienated, insider’s apprehension of the land: of nature and the sense of place, together with a more critical, socially conscious, outsider’s perspective: what I call in the book the landscape “way of seeing.” Reading Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape today, it is obvious to me how far it draws upon J. B. Jackson’s unique capacity to interpret landscapes iconographically and intelligently while remaining true to the everyday experience of landscape as the setting for life and work. Jackson’s essays deepened my own love and understanding, particularly of American landscapes, although I cannot claim to
match Jackson’s evocations of mood, texture and color in specific landscapes.2 More evident perhaps is the influence of his consistent demonstration that landscapes emerge from specific geographical, social and cultural circumstances, that landscape is embedded in the practical uses of the physical world as nature and territory, while its intellectual shaping in America (where his work was concentrated) has drawn upon deep resources of myth and memory offered by both Western Classical and Judeo-Christian cultural traditions.
