The Land

Uluru from Helicopter
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons – Corey Leopold
Accessed 15 October 2020

This website investigates, from an Australian perspective, the changing historical relationship between humans, plants, and their environment planet Earth.

This is a coevolutionary relationship in which humans have been totally dependent on plants. Almost all of our 315,000 year history^[1] was spent as hunter-gatherers in small communities. All this changed around 10,000 years ago with the advent of the settled farming communities that would lead to the vast cities of today. Slow biological evolution was supplemented by rapid cultural evolution that has changed the global cycling of life’s key chemical ingredients.

Assuming an Australian perspective immediately draws our attention to an ancient land occupied by modern humans for about 65,000 years. This is some 50,000 years before the human arrival in the Americas, more than 55,000 years before the continuous human occupation of the British Isles that following the last Ice Age, and about 20,000 years before the human occupation of continental Europe.

Of the many complex consequences that have flowed from the connection between humans and plants, the most obvious is the change to land and landscape.

The land

Iris Lovett-Gardiner Gunditjmar’s statement (above) about the traditional relationship between Australia’s First People and the land expresses the sentiments of a folk whose lives were immersed in nature, both physically and spiritually.

Charles Darwin’s statement, in contrast, comes to us from rural England in 1839, where wild nature had retreated and ‘countryside’ meant ‘agriculture’.

The rural surroundings of Darwin’s day have undergone a further transition as, today, most people in the world live in cities.

It is the historical human transition from nature to culture that will be the focus of this web site.

From farm to city

When we humans, about 10,000 years ago, adopted agriculture as a means of food production we began a process of landscape change that has continued unabated to the present day. The visual character of the earth’s surface has been transformed as wild landscapes have, over about ten millennia, been progressively converted into cultural landscapes as our most familiar surroundings have changed from wild nature to cultivated scenery, to rural countryside, then urban streetscape.

Today most of us live in cities. We may see plants around us, but they are not the plants of forests, steppes, tundra or grasslands, or even those of woodland, wayside, and field . . . they are the plants of parks and gardens.

The urbanization and industrialization that  occurred between 1839 and today has introduced a layer of cultural complexity to modern existence in which plants have been deeply but inconspicuously woven into the fabric of our lives.

Darwin’s English countryside, with its meadows, wheatfields, narrow lanes, hedgerows and ditches, had its rustic agricultural charm, but already in Darwin’s day there was little indication of what Britain might have looked like before humans set foot on its soil. City streets were lined with avenues of trees in a tradition dating back to antiquity; there were a few public parks, and cemeteries were beginning to replace the cramped church graveyards. There were the carefully designed gardens of the wealthy, and the simple gardens of country houses and cottages.

Humans returned to Britain about 11,000 years ago, as warmth returned after the last Ice Age. The agricultural method of managing land for food arrived in Britain in about 6000 BP, having spread to Britain from its origins in the Near East in about 12,000 BP. It took about 8000 years to cross the European continent and reach the British promontory which was, at that time, its north-west corner.

The Roman occupation of Britain that lasted from 43 to 410 CE introduced new technology and a more efficient form of agriculture. Roman garrisons also introduced the continental tradition (dating back several thousand years to the Bronze Age cities of the Fertile Crescent) of gardening, exemplified by the carefully designed ornamental villa gardens. The Romans also introduced market gardening, vineyards, orchards and architecturally elegant buildings made of stone.

Britain was at this time an incongruous land peripheral to the European culture that was centred on the Mediterranean. This all changed in the Age of Discovery with the establishment of maritime trade routes, not only westward across the Atlantic Ocean but both westward and eastward to the lands around the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

In 1900, sixty years after Darwin’s statement (above) Britain could boast the most powerful navy in the world, the British empire commandeering about one quarter of the world’s people and land mass. European and especially British traditions had spread across the world to form ‘Neo-Europes’ like North America, Australia, parts of India, South Africa, South America, and beyond. The cultural legacy of this tradition, like the English language itself, has been adopted by much of the world.

. . . . .

The landscapes we have created around us are just one indication of our interaction with the plant world. This web site examines the way that this history unfolded and the role that plants can play in the creation of a sustainable future.

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First published on the internet – 1 March 2019
. . . 3 May 2023 revision

Uluru from Helicopter
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons – Corey Leopold
Accessed 15 October 2020