
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 27, 1994                   TAG: 9403010190
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Elizabeth Strother
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

WHEN I was a kid, there was a place on the edge of our back yard where a tree, rooted just below the crest of a steep hill, stretched out its low-growing limbs to create a seat the exact right size for a small backside. It was sheltered from the busy street below by all manner of small trees and bushes and undergrowth that covered the hill, and the ground in front of it was beaten bare by children's feet. This oasis of dirt was bounded on the other side by a bed of irises, left unattended to multiply as they could, and, a couple of feet away, a redbud tree.

This was a kids' place, not just mine and my brothers' and sister's, but a place where most all of the kids in the neighborhood hung out at times, talking, scrambling around the "sitting tree," trampling the resilient flowers and feeling free of the ever-watchful eyes of our mothers. My mom could see us easily from the dining room window, but I imagined her staying always in the kitchen, where she couldn't look out on us but where she was readily accessible should we need her. Which we never did. I recall no fights, no accidents, no childhood traumas ever happening there. It was a friendship place.

I was prompted to think about it last weekend at a conference at Virginia Tech sponsored by the landscape-architecture department. The session was devoted to heritage preservation, particularly of important cultural landscapes, both natural and man-made. The opening speaker, Julie Messervy, a landscape architect and author of a book called "Contemplative Gardens," asked everyone in the audience to think of their special childhood place, a place that fed the spirit. People spoke of resting at a particular spot beside a stream, in a corner of a field, amid a stand of bamboo. I'm sure everyone there could remember such a place. I'm sure you can, too.

These are sacred places, not necessarily in the religious sense, but in the sense that they have left an imprint that is a part of who we are. Messervy's goal was to help us recognize the connection between how we feel in such places and the effect of form - of the landscape - upon us.

Communities, too, have sacred places, distinctive landscapes that are part of their souls. The Hotel Roanoke is one. Hard economic facts argued for tearing down the old beauty and building something new. But the Hotel - and no Roanoker would mistake which hotel is f+itheo Hotel - was too important a part of the collective memory to let dollars and cents decide its fate.

This doesn't happen always, or even often. Much of the neighborhood surrounding the Hotel was razed in urban-renewal days, and its loss is mourned still by people who carry the imprint of that place as part of themselves. Perhaps such a spiritual link is being forged by a new generation with the civic center that sits in part of that old neighborhood - but I doubt it.

I could be wrong. Landscapes that are important to communities don't have to be beautiful by any objective standard, but can be made beautiful by the significance they have had in people's lives. Smokestacks can take on this beauty.

Roanoke and the entire region are fortunate, however, to be part of a truly beautiful natural landscape. Our challenge is to prosper and grow without sacrificing it. The city's downtown has held on to at least part of a rich architectural heritage. And the county, for example, has a breath-taking mountainscape along Virginia 419 that has been preserved forever from development, thanks to the vision and generosity of the late Marion Via.

Many treasures have been lost, though. And the growth needed to maintain prosperity will threaten more. Witness encroaching suburbia along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

History Professor James Robertson delivered to the symposium a blistering denunciation of those - particularly planners and local-government officials - who eagerly trade their landscape heritage for the promise of jobs or tax monies. He called landscape architects to task for changing anything in areas rich in history, particularly Civil War battlefield sites.

Even Robertson conceded, though, that development must occur. His passionate plea was for development that preserved as much as possible a nation's sacred places. And the first step is to find out that they're there.

That is exactly what planners must do to preserve a community's sacred places - find out what they are from the people who live there. No community is able to preserve everything of value, and some pieces can be sacrificed without robbing a place of its character. There is a limit, though, to how much a place can change before it isn't that place at all, anymore, but someplace we no longer feel connected to.

The "sitting tree" of my childhood is gone, lopped off our property to make way for a major north-south artery through St. Louis County. I regret the loss, but never seriously thought the memories of a handful of children should block a roadway needed for the metropolitan area. My brother and I dug up all the iris bulbs before the earthmovers arrived, though, and transplanted them along the steps up to the front of our house.

He later bought the house from our mom, and has done a nice job of landscaping the yard. The irises are still there, and he has planted lots of trees. The most beautiful, and closest to the house, is a redbud. The yard is not the same, but it's not unfamiliar.

by CNB