The dry landscape garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, a UNESCO world heritage site, intrigues hundreds of thousands of visitors every year with its abstract, sparse and seemingly random composition of rocks and moss on an otherwise empty rectangle of raked gravel. Here we apply a model of shape analysis in early visual processing to show that the 'empty' space of the garden is implicitly ...

In their travel writings about Europe in the 19th century, Moroccan visitors compare and contrast what they see of the European artistic designs and aesthetic values with experiences from their own native cultures. In this paper, I analyze the discourse and rhetoric about the enjoyment of nature, landscape design and leisure aesthetics as explored in the travel writing of the Moroccan traveler ...

How different this seems from the desolate and malaria-ridden country widely portrayed by nineteenthand early twentieth-century visitors in the region, before the modern agricultural revolution changed the face of the landscape. At another time I hope to deal at length with the matter of cultivation in the Emathian plain in antiquity. At present, however, it may be useful to attempt to understa...

What does a horticulturist or landscape architect strive to attain when choosing plants for a naturalistic animal exhibit in any major zoo? Should visitors come upon bananas and tropical figs complementing an exhibit featuring giraffes or zebras that naturally roam the hot, arid Serengeti? Let’s hope not. Likewise, they should not be confronted by trees that resemble the acacias of arid Kenya a...

Urban green spaces provide important recreational services for urban residents. In general, when park visitors enjoy "the green," they are in actuality appreciating a mix of biotic, abiotic, and man-made park infrastructure elements and qualities. We argue that these three dimensions of structural diversity have an influence on how people use and value urban parks. We present a straightforward ...