What is a Landscape?

From an interview with Laura McPhee from her book River of No Return.

What is a Landscape?

I like J.B. Jackson’s ideas.  In his book Vernacular Landscapes, he tells us that the dictionary defines landscape as “a portion of the land which the eye can comprehend at a glance. ” The word was introduced into English in the seventeenth century as a way to talk about an artist’s interpretation of a view.

But if you go further back (as Jackson does), to the Gothic meaning, you find that land denoted a plowed field.  The second syllable, scape, meant a collection of similar things.  So it seems that landscape was understood as a collection of lands, or, in other words, an assemblage of spaces on the land organized by people.  He also writes, and I love this, that landscape is “a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature… it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.