By John R. Stilgoe

What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills - icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold. Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise - to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.