The Language of Landscapes
The unique power of landscapes as a medium for storytelling, and why more landscape architects (and gardeners) should write.
Good morning, earthlings.
Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage, a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between our natural and technological worlds. I’m chuffed to announce (can I say chuffed if I’m American? Seems weird) that today marks two years of Unnatural Heritage! Cue the confetti! Break out the streamers! Let’s drizzle honey all over our keyboards!
It’s been two years since I committed to a regular writing practice and—surprise!—it really does change your life, guys. Despite the added screen time, I feel like writing has wildly improved my vision. It’s made the quality of my observation feel clearer and more capacious, and suffused my everyday with more texture and emotion. I think my capacity to love has grown—I can feel it in the way I move through the world. While I’m not here to preach (especially to the Substack choir), I do think everyone should write. Even just a little. Even if it’s just for yourself.
The real superpower I’ve gained from writing consistently is the ability to look back and notice the particular patterns or lenses through which I make sense of the world—the common, unintentional themes that surface in my writing and the repeated struggles I face when trying to shape a story.
Personal insights gleaned through writing are often glaring once discovered, but man, it do take distance. For example, it’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to internalize the idea that writing is (duh) a form of composition—it requires me to arrange information and meaning into certain structures and sequences, in order to impart a particular experience onto you, the precious reader. In this way, narrative composition is—cue the galaxy brain meme—incredibly similar to my other vocation: landscape design.
As a landscape architect, I think a lot about our physical relationships with the living world—how we notice, move through, and care for different landscapes, and the ways they influence our behavior and sense of place. Landscape design is a powerful art form in that, unlike writing, it has the potential to engage every one of our senses: vision, touch, smell—but also lesser-known senses like balance and proprioception. Landscape architecture is essentially the composition of embodied experiences, shaped through space and choreographed across time. A book and a hiking trail are really not so different.
At my firm, SCAPE, we’re always trying to reveal the history behind a particular site: choosing native plants that gesture to its ecological heritage, incorporating materials like granite or steel that speak to an industrial past, or framing views to key landmarks to highlight geographic context. To put it simply: we are storytellers. The best designers take this role seriously. What I’ve recently realized is the extent to which my training as a landscape architect influences the way I write—the decisions I tend to make and the traps I fall into when translating my ideas into language.
I just returned from a month-long artist residency in Oregon, where I was working on a piece about data centers and salmon along the Columbia River. It’s a big, unruly story that delves into the ecological and industrial history of the river, and the foundational role it plays in the mythology of the American frontier. It’s also a piece about the future—about the new frontiers of data and artificial intelligence, and what the river might be telling us about the fate of those endeavors. It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve ever tried to write—rewarding, sure, but also really, really difficult. Every single day I face the fear that I won’t be able to finish it. Or worse, do it justice. I worry that the story would be better in someone else’s hands. I’m growing as a writer through the process, but in a real ouch-that-hurts-just-kill-me kind of way.
Part of my struggle, especially as someone with no formal writing training, is that I’m constantly at odds with the way I want to tell the story. I find myself utterly furious with the linearity of language sometimes, how it must be written and read from beginning to end, how much precision the writer must exert in defining a story’s sequence and interpretation. I find myself clawing at my instincts over and over, as I try to compose a world from a pile of words and phrases. Only recently am I beginning to understand the tension.
The Language of Landscapes
In their book, Landscape Narratives, Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton explore the unique ways landscapes operate as storytelling devices, and how they differ from other, more traditional forms of media like painting, literature, or film. As landscape architects, they take a spatial approach, beginning with the analysis of different forms of narrative architecture.
Static imagery—in the form of photography or painting—usually represents an isolated point in time: a single powerful scene, rich with thematic texture but typically limited to the present moment, with only vague gestures to a past or future condition. Consider Albert Bierstadt’s 1890s depiction of Multnomah Falls. It’s the typical grand vista we all seek out in nature—a singular moment of awe-inspiring beauty, the perfect image to post to social media. While the vista or “picture frame” is a common strategy in the landscape architect’s compositional toolbelt, it’s nowhere near the only one. And in the age of Instagram, it shouldn’t be the only one. Real landscapes unfold over time.
The novel or comic strip, by contrast, offers a sequence of scenes over time, usually delivered in a linear fashion. Linear narratives are the most fundamental form of storytelling and offer a useful structure—they’re easy to follow and aligned with our everyday experience of time. But they can also be—and I say this with a bite of contempt—exceedingly constrictive in their ability to tell stories that challenge the reader or draw connections across time. Much of my own writing struggles are a battle with linearity.
Luckily, in our postmodern era—where the grand narratives of modernity are met with suspicion—there are infinite examples of books and films that break free from the linear mold, compositing stories through the use of flashbacks, parallel experiences, or retellings from multiple perspectives. Classic examples include films like Memento (reverse-chronological) and Run Lola Run (circular, repeating), as well as novels like The Overstory (parallel, braided) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (fragmented, multi-perspective).
Landscapes as Continuous Narratives
Among these composite strategies is the continuous narrative, which aims to represent past, present, and future simultaneously within a single unifying context. In Landscape Narratives, Potteiger and Purinton point towards the garden scene from the Roman de la Rose, in which three sequential events—the greeting at the gate, the initial entry, and the entertainment by the fountain—are depicted concurrently within the same scene.
Landscapes, the authors argue, are most similar to continuous narratives in that multiple stories can overlap and be encountered concurrently within three-dimensional space. In a landscape, the reader is fully embodied—the “pages” of a landscape are encountered through movement, and read as if printed on translucent paper, with words and paragraphs layering on top of one another like layers in the soil, blending into a palimpsest of stories and information.
Specific plants whisper clues about season, climate, and geology, providing the introduction to stories of inhabitation, agriculture, or industry. These stories are further elaborated by the materiality of the ground—the shape of the river bank or the openings within a forest. Desire lines gesture toward topography and points of connection, while vistas point toward relationships with natural surroundings and the cosmos. Perfect geometries often tell stories of ownership, commodification, and violence, and the slow drama of recovery may be read in the patterns of moss and lichen.
Each landscape speaks in its own particular language—a local or regional dialect specific to that place. Coastlines speak in ribbons that follow the edge of the tides, while deserts often speak in silence, or in the stoic language of erosion. For our ancestors, the rewards of fluency were survival and connection to place. In today’s society, those imperatives take a different structure—one that de-emphasizes our relations with the landscapes that support us.
Landscape as Index
In his book, Reading the Forested Landscape, Tom Wessels works to recover the lost language of the New England landscape, teaching readers about the phonetics of forest structure and illustrating the semiotics hidden within stumps—how the bark of each tree contains a grammar all its own. If basal scars are observed mostly on the uphill sides of trees, it can indicate a history of forest fires in the area, since brush tends to gather on the uphill side of a trunk, creating tiny “fuel pockets”. However, if the basal scars of multiple trees face one another in a line, it’s more likely an indication of the presence of an old logging road.
The language of landscapes is structurally different from the written word in that signification relies less on the arrangement of abstract symbols—letters, words, and like—and more on the expression of direct relations through indices.
In Charles Pierce’s linguistic theory, the index sits between icons and symbols as a means of signification—as a way of understanding meaning. Icons are our most direct form of representation: the pictogram of a woman in a skirt on the bathroom door, or the silhouette of a deer on a wildlife crossing. Symbols, by comparison, are our most abstracted form of representation: the particular sequence of characters that makes up the word W-O-M-A-N, or MUJER, or FEMME, or 女士. Letters and words are essentially arbitrary in relation to the thing they represent—they can change dramatically across languages while holding similar meanings. For those not fluent in a particular language, the word or sound for woman means nothing.
The index, as I mentioned, exists in the space between direct and abstracted representation. Indices are important because they rely on real-world knowledge about causality and relationships. If the icon for a deer crossing is a silhouette, and the symbol is the word DEER, than the index might be a hoof print, or a pile of little round poo pellets, or a frustrated gardener standing next to a border of decimated hostas, shaking her fist at the sky and vowing to buy a shotgun. Indices are a neglected but important part of our linguistic traditions, because they remind us about the physical relationships between actors, living and not.
Landscape as Antidote to Abstraction
In his book How Forests Think, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn relies heavily on the index to explain how meaning flows freely between the Runa people and the Ecuadorian forest where they live, transmitted simultaneously through the Quichua language and by the movements of leaves and jaguars. It’s strange to think of a forest as thinking, yet signification between beings is happening constantly, in the form of snapping twigs and flashing eyes, underground vibrations and airborne chemical signals. The Runa language transcends words alone, incorporating movement and sound from multiple species. As a result, the boundaries between self and environment begin to blur—they meander and flow, like the giant river that supports them.
In a particularly powerful scene in the book, Kohn describes his experience of having a panic attack while traveling through the Amazon. Unsure of his safety, his thoughts begin to spiral into a hurricane of “what ifs” and future catastrophes. Only much later, at the sight of a tanager in the brush, does his mind suddenly return to Earth. Kohn frames his experience in the space between symbols (words) and indices (real-world relations):
“Symbolic thoughts run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are products of semiosis. But symbolic thoughts run wild can make us experience “ourselves” as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately, even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground [our] thinking in our bodies: I think therefore I doubt that I am.”
For me, the power of telling stories through landscape lies in this “indexical grounding”—the ability to transmit information in ways that are embodied and that make sense TO the body, that ground us in the web of our actual, existing relations. It feels like a powerful antidote to today’s main information source—social media—which is utterly devoid of context, delivering an algorithmically-mediated sequence of posts with no relation to the next except to keep our attention hostage. Social media is dizzying because the web of relations is illegible. Part of our addiction lies in our brains’ evolutionary commitment to finding a throughline: a story (or more likely, a conspiracy) through which to make meaning. But meaning-making, and by extension memory-making, is difficult without a context, without an environment that feels coherent.
Landscape as Field, Not Sequence
The throughline between landscapes and writing is that relationships matter. The composition of a space or story—the sequence and proximity of its different parts—makes a difference in how the experience is perceived, in how the audience constructs or discovers meaning. My foundational struggle thus lies in the fact that landscapes are three-dimensional (well, four, actually: space + time) while writing is, I guess, just more constricted. Literature and film, even if not composed linearly, tend to have a dictated sequence. We watch and read from beginning to end. With the exception of choose-your-own-adventure novels, we’re not usually jumping around in these mediums, experiencing things in whichever order we please.
Landscapes are different. They have multiple entrances, multiple pathways. Even a linear design contains opportunities for variation and exploration. A hiking loop might involve an exhausting climb at the start, followed by a gentle descent. But if taken the other way, the experience is entirely different—a slow climb ending in a dramatic drop-off. Two very different stories. And what if your sister loses her sunglasses along the way? All of a sudden, you’re backtracking halfway through, this time much slower, with eyes towards the ground, noticing insects and mushrooms you hadn’t before, and worrying if you’ll make it back to the car before dark.
Landscapes are an emergent phenomenon—an evolving collaboration between the choices of the designer, the behavior of the visitor, and conditions of the environment. The precision in landscape composition is different, in that there is less control, less pretense of authorship over the outcome. It’s less about setting up a sequence of experiences, and more about setting up a field of possibilities. That’s how I want to approach my writing.
Landscape as Poetry
To reconcile the compositional differences between writing and landscape, I’m beginning to think a lot about poetry. While writing poetry still intimidates me, I realize that I want my nonfiction work to have the quality of poesis: for things to emerge from the composition which are unpredictable and non-explicit. Rather than simply conveying information (a common pitfall of nonfiction), I want to create sensory juxtapositions—the way poetry (and landscapes) do.
Poetry is different from prose in that it inspires cross-hemispheric thinking. Rather than catering directly to our left-brain language centers, poetry attempts to subvert them, breaking the rules and structures of natural language and inviting in the parts of our brain responsible for emotion and intuition. Words and phrases are juxtaposed in a sequence of non-linear associations that layer, pivot, and unfurl in multiple directions. To me, these movements feel more like landscape. Rather than using words as nails to build a house, poetry refashions them as lock picks, granting us access to new worlds of understanding. Similar to landscapes, we are left more with an impression than with a list of bulleted insights. It’s a trace, a clue, a hoof print—as opposed to a clear sign with words. Yet somehow we’re left feeling more grounded, more assured of our place in the world.
I really want to continue noodling on these things, so I’d love to hear from you. How do you think about the relationship between different forms of creativity? Do you have suggestions for readings that dive into these topics deeper? How does your experience in another field or practice affect the way you make art? I’m desperate to talk about this more with folks, so please, shoot me a message!
Until then, thanks for reading :)
Enjoyed this. I have been travelling down a long river in Australia and writing both prose and poetry about the journey. Rivers are naturally linear, thanks to gravity+time but the writing comes to me like what i term the sworls in the brown water, indices for what is going under the water that I cant see.
I often conceptualise & write about essays as a path (implicitly through a landscape). I go on foot a lot so I write a fair bit about walking. The landscape is potentially infinite, but the (animal / human) way through is a kind of line. I'm interested in how, for instance, remembering back over a walk is easy, because the linearity of the walk creates a path that can be easily rewalked in memory. I guess also I am often walking the water’s edge, which is another kind of line.
Similarly, when writing, I feel like I’m walking a mind-path, noting what arises, what I 'see' in my interior landscape as I go along. There is such a strong connection between walking & thinking! Robert Macfarlane has written a fair bit about this too.