The Rural Landscape, 1998, 416 p., 93 dessins, 136 ill., rel. -

In this book, J. F. Hart offers a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape -- those regions that lie at or beyond the fringes of modern metropolitan life. This book provides a deceptively simple method for approaching the often complex and variegated shape of the land. Hart divides it into its mineral, vegetable, and animal components and shows how each are interdependent, using examples from across Europe and America. Hart reveals the impact on the land of human culture and the basic imperative of making a living as well as the evolution of technical skills toward that end. Hart describes with equal clarity the erosion of land to form river basins and the workings of a coal mine. He charts shifting patterns of crop rotation, from the medieval rota of food, feed, and fallow (to restore the land) to modern two-crop cycle of corn and soybeans, made possible by fertilizers and pesticides. He comments on traditions of land division (it is almost impossible to find a straight line on a map of Europe) and inventories a variety of farm structures (from hop yards and oast houses to the use of dikes for irrigation). He identifies the relict features of the landscape - from low earthen terraces once used in the southern United States to prevent erosion to old bank buildings that have become taverns and barns turned into human homes. Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the "bow wave" where city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.