ABSTRACT
Jonathan Bate describes the picturesque landscape as a symptom of the growing division between the two senses of the word 'culture'. The picturesque is a deceptive, and even inaccurate, term because it emphasises one aspect of the eighteenth-century garden to the detriment of its other qualities, such as the importance of the senses and the seasons to design, experience, understanding and the imagination. Creative architects have often looked to the past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Architecture is most often experienced habitually, when it is rarely the focus of attention. But the places, species and phenomena that one include within nature are real and not solely subject to the imagination and will. Acknowledging that authorship involves accidents as well as intentions, the contemporary sciences of climate change, ecology and complexity theory are consistent with the idea of nature as author.
