elements, drawing on ecology’s authority as
science to determine ‘natural’ occurrence and
locational propriety. American nativism
accounts in part for the influential ‘Prairie
School’ of landscape architecture and its succes-
sors in California and Arizona. Like the land-
scape architect Willy Lange in Germany,
adherents advocated using only ‘native plants’ in
the public landscape of gardens and parks, justi-
fying their selections on the grounds of natural
ecological relations. In the light of our knowl-
edge of continuous plant and animal evolution
and migration, the concept of native species with
exclusive rights to presence in landscape appears
an entirely cultural product, whose roots lie in
unexamined anxieties over identity and normal-
izing moral evaluations. A significant body of
historical research in environmental history in
recent years has demonstrated the close episte-
mological and practical connections between
plant identification and classification, global
ecological encounters, European imperialism,
landscape transformation and modern environ-
mentalism. The process bound together imagina-
tive landscapes of Eden and Arcadia with the
actual landscapes of tropical islands and botani-
cal gardens (Grove, 1995).Landscape and genderThe naturalizing power of landscape derives also
from gendering nature. The historical connection
between landscape and modernity and vision’s
epistemological privilege incorporate a shifting
discourse of patriarchy. The long-lasting influ-
ence of Aristotle’s theory of animation, which
marked syllogistic reasoning as an adult male
attribute, placed this denotation at the peak of a
hierarchy of consciousness and life which
reached down through females, children, barbar-
ians, slaves, animals and plants to inanimate
matter. Accordingly, culture was given ‘male’
and nature ‘female’ attributes. This patriarchal
chain of being was reinforced in the early years
of the seventeenth century, notably in Francis
Bacon’s formulation of empirical science as the
means by which an active, masculine mind
would subordinate a passive feminine matter. In
genre classifications of the arts that endured into
the twentieth century, images and representa-
tions of ‘the great deeds of great men’ – in tragic
drama, epic poetry or history painting – com-
manded the highest respect, enacted and located
in the public landscapes of urban power. Matters
of the heart and private life, expressed in lyrical
poetry or recorded in portraiture, were relegated
to a domestic, gardened landscape populated bywomen and children, while fields and farms were
the setting for peasant vulgarities expressed in
unlettered, blank verse. Uncultivated wilderness
remained the haunt of half-human satyrs,
savages and monsters. Landscape images could
be instantly coded according to this gendered
social hierarchy.
Mapping gender alongside class onto space
and nature opened the way to a more explicit
exploitation as mathematical reason became
bound to visual observation and the domination
of nature by modern science. Giorgione’s Venus,
discussed above, is an early example of how the
female body, presented as an object of erotic
desire for the visual pleasure of an implicitly
male subject (predictably both artist and patron
were men), is painted in a ‘state of nature’. This
is the point of both the woman’s nakedness and
her otherwise absurd position in landscape. In
the Classical narrative of such a ‘discovery’, the
male viewer is punished for his voyeurism by
being reduced to a state of nature. Thus Acteon
was turned into a stag and killed by his own
hounds for the mistake of witnessing Diana at
her bath. In the modern formulation, however,
the female body is fully aligned to nature and
both are opened to an uncompromising and
penetrating gaze as the passive property of men
(Mulvey, 1989; Nash, 1996).
The strongly visual pleasure involved in
representing and seeing nature as landscape has
been criticized as an unreflective expression of
patriarchal power expressed in a specifically
heterosexual male eroticism. There is indeed a
long history of associating the smooth topographic
forms and serpentine lines ‘of beauty’ in pic-
turesque landscape with the female body. The
issue is more than merely representational:
active exploitation of ‘virgin’ land by agriculture
and large-scale extractive practices have long
been legitimated by appeal to rational science in
a language of conquest, control and subordina-
tion. Alternative connections with land to the
rational knowledge and detachment associated
with vision have been devalued in part through
their gendered association with sentiment and
soft-heartedness. The logic, language and
imagery of twentieth-century landscape engine-
ering, for example in the great dams of the
western USA and former USSR, or Edward
Teller’s ‘Project Ploughshare’ proposal to use
atmospheric nuclear explosions to dig canals and
harbours, have distinct gender connections
(Kirsch et al., 1998). While patriarchy adopts
varied and indeed contradictory ways of figuring
‘femininity’ – irrational, wayward and wild as
frequently as sentimental, soft and tame – the
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