[F 1 , 1 ]  ~  But a reassessment of the record in California reveals that land management systems have been in place here for at least twelve thousand years— ample time to affect the evolutionary course of plant species and plant communities. These systems extend beyond the manipulation of plant populations for food. Traditional management systems have influenced the size, extent, pattern, structure, and composition of the flora and fauna within a multitude of vegetation types throughout the state. When the first Europeans visited California, therefore, they did not find in many places a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended “garden” that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting. (Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild )

[F 1 , 2 ] Landscape architecture hardly resembles its former incarnations. This loss of identity has occurred mainly because of its loss of vital connections to other fields. Historically landscape architecture maintained integral and dynamic relationships to a variety of pursuits, from painting to sewerage. These relationships were not static or one-way streets; rather, they included an exchange of information that allowed the fields to dynamically play off each other, to evolve and expand. In 18th century England, for example, landscape architecture was, in concert with painting and poetry, one of the three graces, which together influenced broader artistic ideas. In the 19th century, landscape architecture was tied to literary ideas and transcendentalism; practitioners like Olmsted and Cleveland worked alongside Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau, extrapolating literature and philosophy into built form. (Hohmann and Langhorst, Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto. 2004)

[F 2, 1 ] The existence of landscape architecture as a concept, as coined by J.C. Loudon, dates to only 1840, and its use as a professional title to 1862, when Olmsted and Vaux described themselves as landscape architects. 21 The field coalesced from a diverse set of related pursuits—among them agriculture, building, architecture, gardening, and painting/representation— in response to a particular set of political and cultural conditions, including increasing populations, urban growth, the rise of individualism, and industrialization, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These conditions are generally known as modernization, and landscape architecture did not, in the form in which it existed in 1850, exist prior to these modern conditions. (Hohmann and Langhorst, Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto. 2004)

[F 2 , 2 ]  ~  Historically, periods of professional visibility and strength have also been characterized by strong connections to political regimes or to sources of power, money, and influence. Andre Le Notre designed for the powerful, if corrupt, Sun Kings just as Alphand and Hausmann created public open spaces under the dictatorship of Napoleon III. The English Landscape Gardening School and Brown, Repton, Price and Knight were supported by the political power of wealthy landowners; Gilmore Clarke and Horace Albright linked their aspirations to the careers and public policies of Harold Ickes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Robert Moses. In contrast, landscape architects today hide from politics and refuse to engage openly in the broader world of public policy. (Hohmann and Langhorst, Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto. 2004)

[F 2 , 3 ] ~ Historically, periods of professional dynamism and strength in landscape architecture are correlated with strong social agendas. In the early 1800s, the profession’s gestation period, landscape architecture existed for a particularly compelling reason: the amelioration of social conditions caused by industrialization.7 It is no coincidence that landscape architecture gained prominence through the success of the Olmsteds in the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States, where a democratic political system, combined with a huge influx of immigrants, accelerated social reform in the face of modernization. Such professional strength, through a connection to social reform, also characterized the 1930s, when landscape architects created new typologies such as parkways and residential subdivisions, while implementing the quasi-socialist vision of the Roosevelt administration. The 1950s and 1960s were another period of professional vigor, fueled by the social ideals of Modern architecture as transformed and translated into landscape by the likes of Garret Eckbo, James Rose, Hideo Sasaki, M. Paul Friedberg and Larry Halprin.  (Hohmann and Langhorst, Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto. 2004)