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Landscape as Narrative – July 8, 2025

• Admin user
• July 12, 2025
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I’ll be the first to agree that this website is a peculiar assemblage – a fragment of a novel; a collection of articles about deforestation, Muslim shrines, a park in Seoul, Disney’s Aladdin (why not?), landscape design and analysis. The thread that runs through it all is landscape as narrative: as something read in a sequence as we move through it, experience it.

The earliest article here tells a story of a space, Youido Park, whose development from a small rural island in the Han River to the centerpiece of Seoul’s financial district traces Seoul’s narrative from the Japanese occupation to the ultra-vibrant capital city of today. It is only a single example of ways Seoul’s history can be read in landscape change.

Statue of King Sejong the Great, the most famous ruler in Korean history (r. 1418-1450), in Youido Park (January 2003 – my photo).

The next one, The Roads to Ruins, inquires about signs on a landscape. I’m talking about actual signs, road signs, and only secondarily about semiotics. I wanted to look at road signs as a tangible representation of the way the state would like travelers – especially English-speaking/-reading tourists – to read the landscape (or not).

Road sign to one of the beautiful Umayyad qusour, near Wadi al-Ghadaf, in Jordan’s eastern desert. Spoiler alert: there’s no road there (2003 – my photo).

And so on.

The novel – The Servant of Dreams – would be a different story if it weren’t set at Bi’r Mathkour, an historic well deep in Wadi `Araba, Jordan. In many ways the landscape creates the narrative, over-determines it. The bedouin wouldn’t be who they are in another landscape. The archaeologists wouldn’t be there if the terrain and its history weren’t. The development schemes wouldn’t be there without the aquifer that feeds the well, or the tourism that would feed on the archaeological sites, or its historical and spatial relationship to Petra.

The old desert police station at Bi’r Mathkour. This photo has not been treated or filtered — the light really is like that late in the day (2015 – my photo).

My best work, and probably my favorite, has been site analysis – studying the present and past of physical landscapes to learn their stories, and guess where that narrative might take us. I’ve worked on site analyses to understand deforestation, for site planning at heritage sites, and to chart the decline of habitats, among many other things.  At-Turaif, the historic capital of the House of Saud from 1727-1818, is situated on a promontory that once nudged into an oasis on Wadi Hanifa. I analyzed its environmental context and the decline of the oasis by, amongst other methods, mapping the decline of vegetation cover in the (so-called) buffer zone surrounding the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The vegetation maps narrate the decline of the great wadi system which once sustained the Saudi capital.

Wadi al-Hanifa, Dir`iyya, KSA. This aerial photo predates 1975, but probably not by much. The UNESCO World Heritage Site of at-Turaif is nestled into the left side of the big bend in the wadi. We had very little hard information to work with in our documentation of the site (2019). This photo was sourced from Ar-Riyadh Development Authority’s Wadi Hanifah Restoration Project.

Plants tell stories, too. Pretty-flowered harmal (Peganum harmala) dominating bare slopes around Petra tells a story of over-grazing. It is toxic to goats and sheep, so it is all that is left when everything else has been eaten. Tamarisk (Tamarix spp.) tells a story of salt. Gardens everywhere tell stories of diligence, care, stewardship.

Tamarix aphylla, blooming in the center, at Haskell’s Beach north of Santa Barbara (May 2025 – my photo).

When I walk through the Barrio Viejo, where I live, or Armory Park next door, the gardens narrate different histories – the Mexicans who lived here before and after Tucson was in the U.S., the Victorian sensibilities that arrived with the railroad. Scoured into the midst of us is the Tucson Convention Center with its mid-century modern aesthetic: a lot of hardscape and lawn, a fake pond and waterfall, and very few native species. The cypress and palms of midtown speak to the fantasy of Mediterranean and “Spanish” heritage in the 1960s and ‘70s – giving way now to the palo verdes and desert willows of a water-thrifty city.

I hope you’ll come here often and read some plants with me.