Landscape Design and the Natural Sciences in Germany and the United States in the Early Twentieth Century: “Reactionary Modernism”?

Abstract

The increasingly scientific approach to garden culture and to professional ideas on designing gardens has repeatedly received special impulses over the centuries since the Early Modern Era. If previously, it was above all disciplines such as mathematics that found their expression in gardens and in forms of garden art perceived as modern, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the phase of the English landscape garden, particular links were established between scientific disciplines such as philosophy and aesthetics and garden art [see for example, regarding interdependences between philosophy and garden art (Lee 2007)]. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, it was scientific disciplines such as botany and biology, plant geography, plant sociology and ecology that exercised a particular influence on ideas about designing gardens and, finally, whole landscapes. As regards gardens, corresponding concepts for designing gardens were developed and published in Germany from 1900 on, firstly by the garden architect Willy Lange (1864–1941) under the term of the “nature garden”. However, these not only received stimulus from the natural sciences, they were also based on nationalistic and racial notions about a supposed connection between man and nature and the landscape. At the time of National Socialism, such ideas were to become especially influential.