Our landscapes have never failed to entice and capture the imagination of writers, painters and philosophers - and in turn their work has influenced our landscapes for centuries.

This carefully selected collection of readings and commentary expertly guides you through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explores the key writings which shaped the field in its emergence and maturity.

Provoking thought and discussion, this book does not provide answers, and will not conclude with an infallible theory of landscape. But with a range of readings from Vitruvius to Jellicoe, from Burke to Berlin to Berleant, from the Picturesque to Phenomenology, every reader will find something here to set them thinking.