Landscape: “a picture representing a section of natural, inland scenery, as of prairie, woodland, mountains...an expanse of natural scenery seen by the eye in one view.”

Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary

But is landscape merely a picture, a static composition, or passive backdrop to human theater? And what is “natural”?

“Landscape associates people and place. Danish landskab, German landschaft, Dutch landschap, and Old English landscipe combine two roots. “Land” means both a place and the people living there. “Skabe” and “schaffen” mean “to shape”; suffixes “-skab” and “-schaft,” as in the English “-ship,” also mean association, partnership. Still strong in Scandinavian and German languages, these original meanings have all but disappeared from English.”

Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape