By the 18th Century the movements throughout the arts that delved into the linkage of landscape and melancholy in order to foster meditation and sentimentalization began to create a larger style of landscape design called the "Picturesque Movement". Philosophies, arts and literature all contributed to the idea of gardens as meditative spaces. This idea of the picturesque demonstrates a separation the countryside and society - people would insert themselves into wooded areas or gardens in order to find peace. In this way nature did not exist as a reality within one's daily life - it was something one would intentionally encounter in an effort to offset the hard realities of life. This was demonstrably true in the amount of effort and care that was placed upon the design of the landscaped gardens, meant to evoke or imitate the environment as it really existed outside the boundaries of civilization. The first wooded cemetery was proposed in France. It was a result of scientific study suggesting that plants have special properties that can clean pollutants from the air (otherwise known as photosynthesis). Upon discovery of these findings, cemetery reformers began to claim that "it is outside the urban gates that tombs and sepulchers should always be placed. It was certainly a sublime idea to deposit the ashes of great men in some picturesque situation, as was the custom of the ancients. It recalled the memory of them in a very interesting manner, instead of that repugnance which is produced by dismal burying grounds. Those masses of rottenness and corruption, placed in the midst of cities, become infectuous to the living" (quote from Rene Louis de Girardin in 1777)

image: Stourhead Garden, Wiltshire, England. open source (www.google.com)

The legacy of the Picturesque style within the United States exists within the pastoral cemeteries that were modeled on this utopian ideal, and death and landscape began to be linked. It was with these new ideals that the old ways of thinking about death, represented in dismal graveyards, was dismissed. Simultaneously the lack of outward commemoration of important events and people that helped to shape the new republic was being recognized, which caused a newfound investment in neoclassical monuments as a method of memorialization. Nature by definition was associated with society through a sentimental lens, and this is apparent in the iconography of the gravestones. In the late 18th Century the urn and the willow became common forms of representation on tombstones - signifying the appropriateness of the landscape as it related to the perception of death, which was switching from a fatalistic concept of the soul to an emphasis on the mourning process. The willow was popularized in its association with funerary practices because of its cooperation with melancholy picturesque landscapes. In the 1830s and 40s thoughts on nature were changing in relationship to society beyond the picturesque ideals.

image: open source (www.flickr.com)	image: open source (www.flickr.com)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's thoughts, which are the basis of Transcendentalism, wrote the book "Nature" and suggested that God is inherent in all things, and that truth can be derived from nature. It is through these and other writings that people first begin to see that nature is everywhere, and although still separate from man, is within him. Nature is thus defined as both inner nature, or the spirit (by communing with physical nature can your own inner truth be revealed), and outer nature - a reaction against materialism and an appreciation for the world around us.