We present two edited extracts from the new edition of this seminal book. Below, Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe chart the beginnings of human landscape artwork, but first Tim Richardson on the Jungian inspiration behind its creation  

The Landscape of Man is a great and singular work. There is nothing else like it in the canon of literature devoted to landscape and garden architecture – or even, arguably, among works related to other design disciplines. It is a vauntingly ambitious, overarching survey of mankind’s relationship to landscape across all epochs and in all cultures. It remains unsurpassed, and is perhaps unsurpassable, in terms of its scope and scale.

Its progenitors, Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe, were not professional historians or academics; they were involved in the practical business of landscape architecture […] By the time of the publication of The Landscape of Man [1975], Susan was already an established author and editor in her own right, but Geoffrey’s writing style is so distinctive, and so consistently sustained, that it appears that the majority (perhaps all) of the text, barring the captions, was his. The visual elements, however, were a collaboration between the two of them – and this is vital, because the basic rhythm of the book is informed above all by the selection of photographs, plans and illustrations.

This is in some ways a book of illustrated examples strung together as double-page spreads, with quite minimal texts – almost extended captions – attached. As practitioners, it came naturally to the Jellicoes to narrate the story using specific examples: to show, rather than tell.

But The Landscape of Man is much more than a compendium of captioned images. Its intellectual ambition eclipses other survey books […] That is because enveloping it is Geoffrey’s conviction that the landscape design of human cultures is informed above all – or ‘beneath all’ – by subconscious instincts which lie deep within the human psyche. This idea came from the psychological theories of Carl Jung, which were a profound and enduring influence on Jellicoe.

To use Jungian terminology, ‘archetypes’, or symbolic forms and ideas, are embedded in the ‘collective unconscious’ of humankind, and as such can be both recognized and expressed. For Geoffrey, these archetypes were most coherently exhibited in landscape design, which he considered to be ‘the mother of all arts’ and the one with most potential for the future.

As he claimed: ‘Although it is the youngest of the organised arts and by far the most complex, [landscape architecture] can claim to be the only one in harmony equally with the static in architecture and the dynamic in the changing universe of matter.’

Jungian theory is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the text of The Landscape of Man, though Jellicoe does use the phrase ‘collective landscape’ several times. Nevertheless, Jung’s writings clearly informed the book’s tone and content – its almost messianic certainty of mission – and to a large extent facilitated its spectacular breadth and scope. Surely only a Jungian could conceive of the entirety of human consciousness as essentially a single entity which has gone through successive identifiable transformations? As Jellicoe put it: ‘The argument is that the designed landscape has always been a projection of the human psyche into its natural environment.’

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The first landscapes consciously conceived by man appear in the cave paintings of France and northern Spain between 30,000 and 10,000 bce. The painting from Lascaux, France, is a section only, measuring about twenty-six by nine feet. The drawings are instinctive, made before geometry was known, and probably based on ‘sympathetic magic’.

Despite varied scales, the animals are closely related one to another, to their rock wall and to the cavern as a whole. The design is complex in time as well as space, for one animal has later been drawn over another with a respect for the past.

Considered as a whole, the cave paintings are the first and still the most pure of all the intuitive arts of landscape design. Primitive man set his mark on the landscape by raising artificial hills or rearranging stones. The simple heaped mound, emulating a hill and silhouetted against the sky, was the almost universal record of a burial throughout the prehistoric world, as at the Seven Barrows, Wiltshire.

At Carnac, Brittany, the Ménec alignment, made after 2500 bce with over 1,000 stones, is set with two other alignments in a crowded landscape of dolmens (burial chambers), menhirs (single stones) and cromlechs (groups of stones). The stones are regimented, probably for ritual; but each stone is individual, with an overwhelming personality. At the culmination of the alignments are the presumed stones of sacrifice.

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, was completed about 1500 bce and is the climax of symbolic British circular sanctuary. The sarsen stones (weighing up to fifty tons) come from the Marlborough Downs (twenty-four miles away) and the blue stones from South Wales. The design and structure is highly skilled (possibly under Mediterranean influence), the enormous stones being shaped to a purpose. Geometric man had arrived, together with his instruments.

Both gods and ancestors inspired primitive art. The White Horse of Uffington, on the Berkshire Downs, was made some time between 1380 and 550 bce, perhaps the first engraving on any landscape of a major work of art.

The Celts were innovators in agriculture and created new landforms that persist today. Celtic art, based on metal engraving, has a flavour of classicism, but its fantastic elongated animals seem to be influenced by the east, by the nomad art of the steppes. The White Horse, difficult to see from the ground, was almost certainly made for the gods.

On the other side of the world and isolated in the Pacific, the huge stone statues of Easter Island, dating from about the fifteenth century ce, are an original expression of ancestor worship. The proportion of monuments to inhabitants is remarkable. Besides single statues, there are over 300 ahu, or platforms, many with similar sculpture, that extended continuously along the seashore.

Some of the images weigh over twenty tons, and may have been adorned with lightly coloured feathers and red earth washes. The whole island would seem to have been dedicated to sculpture on a colossal scale, among which, in time and space, men moved like ants.

These edited extracts are from the new edition of The Landscape of Man (Thames & Hodder, £65) by Geoffrey Jellicoe and Susan Jellicoe, edited by Tim Richardson. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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