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Cover image of The Rural Landscape
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The Rural Landscape

John Fraser Hart

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From the acclaimed landscape historian and geographer, a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape.

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

In this book, John Fraser Hart offers a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape—those regions that lie at or beyond the fringes of modern metropolitan life. Though the last two centuries have seen an inversion in the portion of people living on farms to those in cities, the land still beckons, whether traversed in a car or train, scanned from far...

From the acclaimed landscape historian and geographer, a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape.

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

In this book, John Fraser Hart offers a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape—those regions that lie at or beyond the fringes of modern metropolitan life. Though the last two centuries have seen an inversion in the portion of people living on farms to those in cities, the land still beckons, whether traversed in a car or train, scanned from far above, or as the locus of our food supply or leisure.

The Rural Landscape provides a deceptively simple method for approaching the often complex and variegated shape of the land. Hart divides it into its mineral, vegetable, and animal components and shows how each are interdependent, using examples from across Europe and America. Looking at the land forms of southern England, for instance, he comments on the use of hedgerows to divide fields, the mineral or geomorphological features of the land determining where hedgerows will grow in service of the human animal's needs. Hart reveals the impact on the land of human culture and the basic imperative of making a living as well as the evolution of technical skills toward that end (as seen in the advance of barbed wire as a function of modern transportation).

Hart describes with equal clarity the erosion of land to form river basins and the workings of a coal mine. He charts shifting patterns of crop rotation, from the medieval rota of food (wheat or rye), feed (barley or oats), and fallow (to restore the land) to modern two-crop cycle of corn and soybeans, made possible by fertilizers and pesticides. He comments on traditions of land division (it is almost impossible to find a straight line on a map of Europe) and inventories a variety of farm structures (from hop yards and oast houses to the use of dikes for irrigation). He identifies the relict features of the landscape—from low earthen terraces once used in the southern United States to prevent erosion to old bank buildings that have become taverns and barns turned into human homes. Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the "bow wave"where city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.

Reviews

Reviews

John Fraser Hart's study of the ever-changing rural landscape is a competent and richly illustrated account of human endeavour, charting patterns of land use across time and space, from the small cross-ploughed fields of Neolithic Britain to the vast wheat-producing plains of modern-day America. It reveals how history is continuously incorporated into the landscape.

Hart has a keen eye, a facile pen, and a love for conversation with people who live and work in such places. The result is an admirable and wide-ranging book.

A wonderful record to have between two covers... well produced with photographs of exceptional clarity.

This layperson's guide to the rural landscape, written by one of the world's foremost experts, treats the contemporary rural landscape not as an artifact of the past but rather as a continuing product of human impacts on nature. John Fraser Hart makes clear how history gets reincorporated continuously as each generation makes changes in the landscape to suit its own needs.

No one knows our rural landscapes better than John Fraser Hart and no one has written as clearly and tellingly about them. He tells us what all those visible patterns and structures really mean in terms of life and work and the larger forces that impinge upon them. This is a richly illustrated and informative work about our constantly changing countryside.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.25
x
9.25
Pages
416
ISBN
9780801857171
Illustration Description
136 b&w illus., 93 line drawings
Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Understanding Landscapes
Part I: Rocks
Chapter 2. The Surface of the Land
Chapter 3. Landscapes of Mining
Part II: Plants
Chapter 4. Plant Life
Chapter 5. The Use of

Preface and Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Understanding Landscapes
Part I: Rocks
Chapter 2. The Surface of the Land
Chapter 3. Landscapes of Mining
Part II: Plants
Chapter 4. Plant Life
Chapter 5. The Use of Forests
Chapter 6. Cropping Systems
Part III: Land Division
Chapter 7. Land Division in Britain
Chapter 8. Land Division in America
Part IV: Farm Structures
Chapter 9. Fences and Fields
Chapter 10. Barns
Chapter 11. Other Farm Structures
Chapter 12. Farm Size and Farm Tenure
Part IV: Small Towns and the Urban Edge
Chapter 13. Small Towns
Chapter 14. The Long Shadow of the City
Chapter 15. Recreation
Epilogue: The Changing Countryside
Further Reading
Index

Author Bio
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John Fraser Hart

John Fraser Hart is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. His previous books include The South, The Land That Feeds Us (recipient of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the American Association of Geographers), and, as editor, Our Changing Cities. The Rural Landscape is a thoroughly reworked successor to his earlier book, The Look of the Land, with only a few relict features.