The “Landscape must become the law”—or should it?

The idea that society ought to be governed by the “law of landscape” must be seen in the context of the process by which the idea of landscape merged with that of nature in the course of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In order to comprehend how these ideas morphed into the idea that “nature must become the law” as propounded by IFLA this history is traced. Through the linkages of “natural” social ideals with what was seen to be a “natural” style of landscape gardening, reforms sought to promote what often was seen to be a more just and economically, socially and physically sustainable form of society. This was an inherently conservative approach. It is shown how the ideas of landscape that developed from the Enlightenment to the period of land embellishment took a diabolical turn during the era of National Socialism in Germany. The idea of rooted-in-the-soil native plants as the ideal constituent of a German “landscape” continued among landscape architects and landscape planners after the liberation from National Socialism. Though somewhat diluted in the course of the second half of the twentieth century it re-emerged in a kind of renaissance in late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries under the terms “ecological planning” and the “nature garden”. Another source of these ideas lies particularly with the thinking of “anthroposophists”. The passage of a current legal landscape document, The European Landscape Convention, the heritage of the idea that “landscape must become the law” has gained new pertinence.