The design of forest landscapes.

The Forestry Authority, as the country's leading authority on forestry
practice, has Design Guidelines which aim to offer designers sound relevant
and appropriate advice on the theory, process and practice of forest
landscape design. The guidelines therefore represent the FA's vision of how
designed Britain's forest landscapes should appear. The aim of this study is to
rigorously evaluate the advice offered in the FA's guidelines in relation to
the FA's objective to offer an aid to design.
A literature review and series of interviews with those responsible for the
advice explores the motivation behind the introduction and development of
the guidelines. The review concludes that the unusual circumstances
surrounding the inception of guidelines are likely to have resulted in the
advice having a strong forestry bias, a weak theoretical framework and to be
offering advice that is divorced from other land-use interests. An analysis of
the nature and contents of the guidelines and the subsequent critical
discussion suggests that the advice is not always complete, consistent, logical
or relevant.
The concept of an alternative approach to offering forest landscape design
guidelines is tested through both a postal questionnaire and a field survey.
The findings for the postal questionnaire suggest that the FA's advice is
generally well used and found useful but that it is at times limited and fails to
respond to the needs of the current user group. The findings for the field
survey show that enough evidence exists to support the concept and further
investigation along these lines. The study concludes by making 20
recommendations for changes or additions to the FA's current advice, which
address the issues raised by the research findings. These recommendations
are offered as a framework within which alternative advice could be further
developed.