The Art of Terraced Landscapes Journal

This ITLA Art Journal about Women and Terraces presents two different contributions that harmonize diverse concepts of beauty (aesthetic values) and goods (economic values) emerging from personal experiences with terraced landscapes. ¨Solace in a Time of Covid¨ (with a nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez) from Bethe Hagens takes us to Maine, USA. Her home garden on a hill is the location where she, for more than six years, patiently removed trash, created soil and planned her dream garden with terraces made of stones and a great variety of edible plants and flowers growing freely. Her vision is of a long lasting territory where plants, insects, animals and humans share life in community. ¨History of a Hillside¨ from Louisa Jones transports us to a terraced hillside in south-eastern France. She and her husband bought in 1975 two properties of seven hectares. One part was severely damaged by agrochemicals, the other was abandoned for five decades. Enriching diversity in hill ecosystems, creating visual rhythms with stone walling, Louise and Bernard are passing down a local heritage, a place of enjoyment and inspiring well being. We showcase these two contributions and sequences of photos which convey the meaning of regenerating nature attached to the hills of Maine, USA and to the slopes of Ardèche, France. They present in their own words two distinctive personal experiences in specific mountain landscapes rooted in different times and spaces. However, following commonalities can be highlighted in both cases: Many years trusting local knowledge, dedicated to internal and external transformative processes. Patiently crafting stones, shrubs, flowers, trees, edible perennial plants, relying on sunlight and recuperating the health of earth. Many years devoted to generating visual rhythms up and down the slopes creating extraordinary, singular beauty inextricably linked to enrich and protect biodiversity. Bethe and Louise believe in the wellbeing of the terraced territories expressed in their visions of future. These transcend the individual sphere and include nurturing diverse forms of thinking and feeling, widening the sense of community including all forms of life: plants, insects, animals and the coming generations of humans. Moreover, these experiences of landscape transformations confirm that the essence of shaping hills is an intimate relationship of recreating diversity in a fine-tuning communication between humans and nature: an on-going dialogue recognizing the visible and hidden qualities of land, its dynamic forms and the natural rhythms to produce a great variety of goods having in mind the wellbeing of the community in a diversity of modalities