The Least You Need to Know About Landscape

By Mary Adelaide Scipioni

This accessible introduction to the culture, art, and science of landscape design is essential for the aspiring landscape connoisseur. It will quickly bring you up to speed on a range of topics such as design composition and media, microclimate, and sustainability. In a couple of hours, your understanding will go well beyond that acquired from a garden-variety magazine. The Least You Need to Know about Landscape draws from the training, international experience, and research of a landscape architect and perpetual student of the creative process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Adelaide Scipioni
• Release date: Oct 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370702114

Mary Adelaide Scipioni

Mary Adelaide Scipioni is a landscape architect who has lived and worked in NYC, Milan, Italy; and Western Massachusetts. She is now practicing in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of New York State. She has taught landscape and site design as well as urban design and planning at various colleges including The University of Massachusetts Amherst; Mount Holyoke College; Hampshire College; and the Rochester Institute of Technology's graduate architecture program. Mary Has served on municipal boards and committees concerned with community planning and development as well as visual quality and neighborhood character. Her consulting activity, Pebble-stream, is focused on creating beautiful, livable residential waterfront properties and often concerns water quality and stormwater management issues. Mary has published many essays on Medium.com and often writes about the aesthetic and social culture of Italy, where she lived for eighteen years.

Book preview

THE LEAST

YOU NEED TO KNOW

ABOUT LANDSCAPE

A hardly exhaustive survey of the things that matter,

that may change the way you think about landscape.

by Mary Adelaide Scipioni, Landscape Architect

© 2011 by Mary Adelaide Scipioni

Introduction

New England gardeners spend a good part of their time beating back the forest, while those in Colorado carefully select species that can survive with minimal water requirements. City dwellers reinforce and waterproof their rooftops to support gardens, hospitals hang paintings of lush garden plantings as a form of visual therapy, campus groundskeepers mow, prune, and plant for graduation ceremonies; children run into the remnant of a forest and create a world of play.

The landscape is our life source and we all share an attraction to discovering it, altering it, trying to dominate it, and in the best of cases, making it richer.

This is a landscape primer, and it covers a great deal of territory in not-so-many pages. It is slightly biased toward the temperate North American landscape. It is not meant to be a scholarly work. The Least You Need to Know about Landscape performs a historical flyover, defines the landscape professions, discusses land development, describes the role of the materials used in landscape design, studies the elements of design composition, and makes a plug for bringing science into design through an understanding of microclimate and sustainability. It is what you might learn over time from a friend who is a landscape architect—driving around in a car, working on a project together, chatting at a party. If you take each category independently, it is painfully deficient. Taken as a whole, it may open your eyes to a new world. It is to be hoped that you will question it, and be stimulated to learn more about the topics that most pique your interest. I’d like to think that everything is in here, somewhere, at least in some minuscule quantity, but there is so much to the art and science and culture of landscape that I know that’s not possible.

This is dedicated to those who tirelessly search for and create beauty in the landscape.

A Fistful of Soil

To most of us, driving a shovel into the ground is the symbolic beginning of a creative act. It is also an act of conquest. The destruction of the intricate and complex soil structure, possibly hundreds of years in the making, may cause as much ecological disturbance as the felling of a large tree. But dig we continue to do, with increasingly mighty shovels, to create that which designers often refer to as the built environment.

So I think that making you aware of the preciousness of undisturbed soil is a suitable starting point. This rich surface is the interface of the continuing cycle of life, the seemingly insignificant stage for everything that is beautiful and nourishing in the landscape. It really can’t be sold in a bag.

If we remember to leave even a small portion of soil undisturbed on each site we develop, we’ll have conserved its qualities and allowed it to propagate, somewhat like a yogurt culture (over a longer period of time, of course).

But