Why we love a bit of Africa in our parkland by Matt Ridley

This was in The Times and it was a piece about Capability Brown (Lancelot to his mum) who was born nearly 300 years ago, and was commissioned by 280 landowners to design the aesthetically perfect landscape. He tore out walls, canals, avenues, topiary and terraces to bring open parkland, with grassy tree-topped hills and glimpses of sinuous, serpentine lakes, right up to the ha-has of country houses.

He was not the first, before him were Bridgeman (great name for a landscape designer) and William Kent, in copying pictures of Arcadia by Claude, using ideas of a perfect landscape before the Fall.

What is the landscape we find most attractive and why? Appleton, a geographer, in The Experience of Landscape (1975), suggested that humans have an "atavistic sensitivity" to landscapes which offer the best chances of survival in the wild. "Habitat theory simply suggests that human beings experience pleasure in and satisfaction with landscapes insofar as these landscapes are perceived to be conducive to the realization of their biological needs." (Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics and Planning  By J. Douglas Porteous)

Apparently we need to see without being seen, or find hiding places from any animal trying to hunt us. and we need to hide from the animals we are trying to hunt. So we like wide vistas, and clumps of leafy trees. We like crags, towers and viewpoints too, to get a good "prospect".

We also like to see water, green grass and a good supply of healthy animals (the larder).

Other experiments have established that of all landscapes, humans seems to prefer to look at the African Savannah, and that this is because we evolved and survived in this landscape first (although I'm not sure this is still believed as at this time the savannah was jungle I have been told).

So the English landscape garden is typically designed to be similar to the African savannah, and this style became popular in Europe and north American too, not only in garden/ parks but also public parks and golf courses and even cemeteries. (Mara Miller 1993; the Garden as an Art)