Leading by the Nose

For humans, walkable neighborhoods and commercial hubs reward strolling with varied architecture, safe street crossings, and a mix of things to do and see on foot. For dogs, there is a much larger world of scent. Can our canine companions guide us to a richer walking experience?

Frank Edgerton Martin

Dogs and other animals understand sidewalks and parks not as visually ordered settings but as shifting islands and drifts of smells. When we humans step out the door, it’s basically the same outdoors we left behind. But for the dog with us on a leash, a street is like a flowing stream filled with the scent trails of passing people and dogs. It’s an ever-changing place.

In 2003, I adopted a yellow Labrador named Samson from the Hennepin County Humane Society. When I first saw him, he struck me as quiet and observant as he sat there upright, regarding the other dogs as they barked and whimpered. For years, Samson spent his days sitting Sphinx-like on the front steps, left paw crossed on right, surveying passersby. He became famous among the neighbors for wanting to sit outside even on the coldest January days.

Samson loved meeting people and other dogs. He was a natural greeter, but we found little social life along the roads and subdivisions of our Lake Minnetonka neighborhood. And because I myself was more interested in architecture than in exercise, I often found our walks boring. But Samson and I both needed exercise and to get outside for strolls. Over the years we developed a set of alternative suburban environments that made sense for both of us.

Instead of walking by lawns and large houses, we got in the car (a thrill for Samson) and drove to denser places where we could do the things we liked, such as: smelling other dogs, visiting antique shops, sniffing sidewalk trees, and sitting in outdoor cafés while greeting people and watching traffic. We often went to downtown Excelsior, a 19th-century town where we could do all of these things. But we also made new discoveries. For some reason, Samson loved outlet malls, perhaps because the long sidewalks afforded him the chance to meet a lot of people.

I took him to Tonkadale Greenhouse and other nurseries where we could walk among the plants in winter, admiring shoppers could pet him, and we could take in the fragrances and humidity. In summer, we went to public docks on Lake Minnetonka, where Samson greeted those departing from the tour boats. Seniors and teenage girls particularly loved him.

TALKING SCENTS

In her collection of essays On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz takes us along on eleven treks, mostly in Manhattan, with experts in a variety of different fields—graphic design, geology, entomology, and so on. Another one of the experts is her dog Flip, who reminds me of a more citified version of Samson.

Horowitz is a cognitive psychologist who writes extensively on dogs and how they perceive the world. In describing her walk with Flip, she notes that “smell, like memory, is entirely personal. It cannot be shared with the ease that an image, rendered in ink or oils, can be experienced by hundreds of millions of viewers.”

Smells are not easily communicated in words; we humans have only vague olfactory classifications such as “sweet,” “earthy,” or “pungent.” But dogs like Flip and Samson experience nuanced smells in thousands of variations. They may not have a word for each, but they have recognition all the same. For dogs, smells form an unfolding map of information about specific places and other animals and people. “Their world has a topography wrought of odors . . . the landscape is brightly colored with aromas,” writes Horowitz.

ARBY’S

When touring a neighborhood, we humans use visual classifications such as “late Victorian” or “New Urbanist.” Dogs, of course, could care less. From my walks with Samson, I learned more about the experiences that mattered to him, and, in doing so, I began to appreciate suburban landscapes in a different way.
I learned that busy places like Main Streets and public parks have a smell history. Huge parking lots can be bleak for all. Samson and I agreed that big-box stores and malls were the worst—visual and olfactory deserts unsuitable for a hike. But a parking lot at Arby’s could be a sacred place.

At least it was for Samson, who generally refused to leave after we sat on the grassy suburban berm and shared a bag of curly fries. After snacks, I would walk with him around the building—along the lane leading to the drive-thru, past the drive-thru window (with faster sniffing because much is dropped there), and around to the back where the exhaust fans are (a kind of climax). This circuit never tired him, and he would tug billy-goat-like on the leash when I tried to get him back into the car. Inevitably, I would have to pick him up, all 75 pounds, and dump him in the backseat.

A dog can sniff fast when there is much to take in, like at a drive-thru window—up to seven times per second. Humans can only take in a new scent about once every two seconds. We have about five million olfactory sense receptors; a bloodhound can have 300 million. A dog can gauge a smell’s strength by its variance between nostrils.

Samson and I had many kinds of walks, the hardest being the “process of elimination” at 7:00 on January mornings. When it was 20 degrees below zero, he always sniffed too long. But sometimes we both liked to linger in a place. We might sit in a park, Samson sniffing with darting nose the scents of other dogs flowing from upwind. With my eyes and ears, I observed things too—where people gathered, the shouts of children, and impromptu soccer games on an open patch of grass.

TAKING THE TIME

In an interview with the National Canine Research Council, Horowitz put into words what I intuited from Samson: We need to value our dogs’ “dogness.” This “means appreciating that they get bored, and working to give them things to do; it means celebrating their perceptual abilities, and letting them smell the well-marked spots at length,” she explained.

By following our canine companion’s lead, we two-legged animals can rediscover important things—the fragrances of childhood, so deeply implanted that they seem like they occurred only yesterday. From my walks with Samson, I recalled the smell of leaves burning on an October afternoon; the peonies in June that my mother floated in a crystal bowl; what a pumpkin smells like when you carve it. No matter how boring a place may seem, a dog can open up a new journey. If I’d never had my walks with Samson, I may never have lingered, pausing to discover scents and other creatures hidden in a world we mostly see.

http://www.aia-mn.org/leading-by-the-nose/

Making Sense of an Historic Landscape - Stephen Rippon

London: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hardback, 416 pages
416 pages; 100 illus. 8 pp color plates; 9.2 x 6.1

by, Frank Edgerton Martin

Making Sense of an Historic Landscape is a broad geographic study of a relatively small English region. Author and landscape archaeologist Stephen Rippon’s overall goal is to study the balance between “environmental determinism” and human “social agency” in shaping a landscape. He explores this difficult question through the lens of a specific region divided by a geographic range called the Blackdown Hills that runs between Somerset and Devon in southwest England.

Is it the “luck” of settling on good farming soils with reliable water sources that adds up to a prosperous region? Does topography directly determine the location of roads and communities? Making Sense of an Historic Landscape argues that ecology and climate matter, but there are also other, less physical but equally important variables in regional character. The challenge is to understand the ecology, local culture, and human perception of landscapes as a whole.

Rippon studies the Blackdown Hills in southern England as a potentially decisive boundary in landscape character from prehistory onwards with a deep focus on the last 500 years. He sees this project as a specific case study that can be applied as a model for other regions, presumably far beyond the United Kingdom.

 After many centuries of habitation, the shape of fields, place-names, and styles of house design are noticeably different either side of the Blackdown Hills. Rippon suggests that these differences reflect a diversity of local cultures that somewhat surprisingly endure across much of southern England, even in the Internet Age. His approach to “making sense” of historic landscapes—their similarities, contrasts, and regional variations—borrows techniques from many geographic sub-specialties including: soils mapping, place names, and local comparisons of vernacular building forms. None of these techniques is new, yet rarely has someone applied them all together in such depth to study such a relatively small area.

 Rippon chose the Blackdown Hills and the lands on either side of them because their housing types, settlement patters, and village forms are so different. Dividing Devonshire from Somerset, the sparsely populated Blackdown Hills have been protected as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) since 1991. In contrast to the dense village network to the east, the western edge of Rippon’s study area is Dartmoor, a vast open wilderness home to one of Britain’s most famous national parks, novels of intrigue and romance, and a rich folklore tradition of supernatural spirits.

 In the first pages, Rippon expresses his goal “to expand on the traditional academic preoccupation of characterizing landscape in terms of their settlement patterns and field systems, and to try to understand the ways that people in the past have expressed their identities through standing buildings, the language of landscape (field- and place-names), agricultural practices, and the territorial structures within which they lived” (p. 3). 

 For most people outside academia, all this seems to make sense. Yet, such a multi-disciplinary approach is all too rare in British (and we might presume) American landscape studies. Rippon points out that scholars in each of these layers of landscape character tend to have their own journals and conferences and that one of the aims of this study is to break down these barriers.

 The book includes over fifty maps of the Blackdown Hills regions that document these many layers of cultural and ecological resources. The core chapters embrace: human perception, settlement patterns, house forms, fieldscapes, Roman and medieval cultivation and husbandry, and place names.  Building toward the greater whole that Rippon seeks, these sections are exhaustive and often exhausting to read unless one is directly engaged in the area discussed. Yet, for the purpose of testing the balance between environmental and social agency, their detail is a worthwhile effort.

 For landscape architects, long acquainted with regional mapping and “the overlay” technique dating back at least to Warren Manning, such a composite approach to landscape analysis is not new. What is somewhat new is Rippon’s full-spectrum approach. Beyond the ecology of soils, slopes, and vegetation—and beyond the cultural geography of human-made elements such as hedgerows and road patterns studied in W.G. Hoskins's masterful "The Making of the Landscape"(1955)—Rippon looks to a “conceptual” record of landscape. He seeks to document how people in the distant and more recent past perceived the locales on either side of the Blackdown Hills.

Many American readers may be somewhat limited in our understanding of Rippon’s field of landscape archaeology (largely taught in Britain) and the millennia of British history that he incorporates in this multi-disciplinary study. Yet, his perception of the field of landscape history is also very Anglo-centric with almost no mention of the remarkable 20^th century legacy of American cultural geographers beginning with Carl Sauer in the 1920s and leading up through the work of Yi-fu Tuan and J.B. Jackson whose interest in maps was deepened by his work with Allied Intelligence in World War II.

Because of this oversight, Rippon gives the mistaken impression that the field of cultural landscape preservation and history began only recently. “The term ‘historic landscape’,” he writes, “first came into use as recently as the early 1990s as a concept developed by archaeologists to advise planners and countryside managers of the historical depths present in the modern landscape (p. 54). For an American reader, this claim reads patently false given the fact that such academic groups as the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation was founded in the 1970s with the active participation of landscape architects. Their writings, like those of Tuan and others, explore the ideas of “place attachment”, vernacular landscapes, and the expressions immigrant cultures in the built landscape.

By Rippon’s inclusion of folklore and literature in his study, these geographic voices and those of such continental phenomenological writers as Gaston Bachelard are present at least in spirit. To capture the landscape of memory and its transmission through writing, Rippon cites travel accounts from writers such as Daniel Defoe to 19^th century Board of Agriculture reports.

He quotes a landscape description from the writer Celia Fiennes who, between 1682-1698, traveled the region and described its contrasts and vistas that survive to this day.  On the eastern fringes of the Blackdown Hills, she described the area around Chard as “such an enclosed country and narrow lanes you cannot see a bow shot before you.” After traveling through Somerset, she found a very different landscape when arriving into Devonshire over “a high ridge of hills which discovers a vast prospect on each side full of enclosures and lesser hills…you could see vast tracts of ground full of enclosures, good grass and corn beset with quicksets and hedge rows.” (p. 39)  Set probably at Maiden Down, a watershed line between two valleys, such an early description conveys how important watersheds were and are in creating regions of distinct local character.

Ultimately, Rippon concludes that both the natural environment and human agency matter in the long-term shaping of cultural landscapes. This finding seems hardly surprising even though it has long been a subject of debate. More surprising and largely unresolved in this study are the conundra: why do local areas throughout southern England continue to retain the same identities and variations that they have held for centuries? Why is change in perception and building forms so slow?

Rippon’s academic influence runs deep, if not far beyond the UK; and this study is documented with hundreds of footnotes and references that show the depth of his study. One wonders if the same sharp and enduring contrasts in local landscapes would apply to North America. For landscape architects and preservation historians, many of the analysis techniques are valid here, but practitioners must ask: are they really relevant for our work? Is the fine-grained mosaic of the English countryside an appropriate model for vast American spaces?

I believe that this detailed study is relevant if taken as a methodological model that can be adapted to specific projects. For the United States, these historic landscape planning subjects include: National Heritage Areas (NHAs), Scenic Byways, National Parks and Forests.

Covering much of two English counties, Rippon’s study area is somewhat similar to an American NHA in both its scale and its wealth of eras. There are now roughly fifty NHAs across the country; and because they emphasize grassroots participation, regional stories, conservation, preservation, and interpretation through networks of independent sites, they are at the forefront of American historic preservation. They also involve no federal land ownership, a key issue in these days of Property Rights debates.

I found Rippon’s study to be most relevant for my own historic landscape preservation work at this regional scale, especially for the Freedom’s Frontier NHA that extends over much of western Missouri and eastern Kansas. As the site of the Border Wars that led up to the Civil War, this region was divided not by a mountain range but by an arbitrary political boundary between slave and free states.

A few years ago, I worked with landscape architects from Jeffrey L. Bruce & Company to create a management plan that was one of the first to begin a management strategy for natural and human resources through understanding pre-settlement ecology. Like Rippon’s exploration of the roles of nature and human agency in shaping the Blackdown Hills region, National Heritage areas can become a crucible for such research.

By studying ecological systems and geology at the regional scale and asking why town sites, skirmishes, types of agriculture, and pioneer trails happened where they did, Freedom’s Frontier’s new management plan creates logical connections between natural and human history and why some Border War conflicts may have happened where they did. This type of integrated approach could not have happened without my collaboration as a historian with landscape architects who were able to document and visually convey overlapping natural and human systems. By connecting natural resources such as wetlands, soils, and streams with historic sites, planners can make stronger arguments and targeted strategies for protecting both.

 

Like the “nature versus nurture” debate in pedagogy, we may never know how much of the character of a specific historic landscape reflects a legacy of pre-settlement ecology and how much it is a direct expression of sheer human will and choices made. Perhaps, we never will have a full understanding of why some places change so slowly. But, for landscape architects and planners who often manage historic resources and fragile ecologies, these puzzles can enrich our study of why and how a landscape came to be what it is today.