Outdoor living: Suburban landscapes, sense of place, and environmentalism in the American West

Western suburbs developed as a middle ground between city and open land. More than just their geographical location defined them as middle grounds, however. Culturally, they also developed a sense of home that encompassed both city and wilderness in complicated, often problematic ways. Using a variety of unpublished and published sources, including the papers of two Western landscape architects, S. R. DeBoer and Arthur Carhart; garden club records; and Sunset magazine, this dissertation argues that Western suburbs in the twentieth century defined a sense of place based on the concept of "outdoor living," a notion that captured both suburban gardens and wild lands under one lifestyle and regional identity.; Landscape architects, tastemaking magazines, housing developers, and garden clubs, among others, cultivated a landscape and culture of outdoor living that variously combined outdoor recreation, native plant gardening, and environmentalism. As tastemakers, they held powerful roles. For example, some inculcated an aesthetic that favored the untidy appearance of a rich native plant community over the more conventional garden, and thereby redefined the garden itself along with the gardener's relationship to wild lands. Outdoor living was rooted in a regionalist sense of place, however, and so it reflected the complexity of the postwar West, including suburban Westerners' treatment of nature as a place for play and consumption rather than work and production. The basic suburban design and outlook of postwar Western society complicated the sense of environmental responsibility that some outdoor living advocates promoted.