Can Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms?

Abstract

For more than two centuries, landscape design in Western culture has been considered a matter of creating visual imagery, usually divorced from any concept or understanding of natural process. This view has often resulted in landscape forms that lack roots in the earth and are therefore shallow in character. The ecological understanding developed over the past several decades makes it clear that in nature the landscape we see is the visible manifestation of underlying, ongoing processes. Form and process are inseparable. For landscape design to be truly meaningful, it should also give visible expression to the processes that shape the earth, thus making a connection between nature and human culture. Landscapes that accomplish this can be described as having deep forms.