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How To Describe A Landscape: Open Land

The document provides examples of how to describe different types of landscapes including open land, mountains, valleys, water, forests, cities, and a mixture of landscape features. Descriptions of open land focus on its flat, dry, and featureless nature. Mountain descriptions mention volcanoes, granite formations, and cliffs. Valleys are described as bounded areas or grasslands. Water features include floods, streams, and rivers. Forests are depicted as dense woodlands or jungles. Cities have cracks, streets, and views from above. The final section mixes landscape elements like ponds, reeds, grasslands, and plants.

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JHORMAN DAVID DINAS LOPEZ
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© © All Rights Reserved
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32 views

How To Describe A Landscape: Open Land

The document provides examples of how to describe different types of landscapes including open land, mountains, valleys, water, forests, cities, and a mixture of landscape features. Descriptions of open land focus on its flat, dry, and featureless nature. Mountain descriptions mention volcanoes, granite formations, and cliffs. Valleys are described as bounded areas or grasslands. Water features include floods, streams, and rivers. Forests are depicted as dense woodlands or jungles. Cities have cracks, streets, and views from above. The final section mixes landscape elements like ponds, reeds, grasslands, and plants.

Uploaded by

JHORMAN DAVID DINAS LOPEZ
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to Describe a Landscape

Posted on July 8, 2011 by JACQUI MURRAY

Taken from: https://worddreams.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/how-to-describe-a-landscape/

They are many and varied, so I’ll just touch on each. These, as usual, come from writing I
admire, so don’t copy them. Use them to inspire your own creativity:

Open land

Flat, dry, and monotonous, a seemingly limitless scrub waste without landmarks or
water or other relief
Great sandstone outcropping
Easing over humps and trenches, potholes and stone rivers, bashing through the trees
where a track is blocked, the bucking climbs up steep eroded banks
This wasn’t a Sahara-like desert of sand dunes. There were sporadic tufts of trees,
acacia and baobab, and on-again off-again grasses and shrubs as far as the eye could
see atop the brown earthen crust, a surface that looked as hard as stone and
somehow even less inviting.
A large outcropping of bundled roots from the remains of a dead baobab had broken
free from the hard pack alongside the road and needed to be negotiated, a dry wadi
that crossed the highway required downshifting to safely cross,
The miles, the motion, the flat wide-open land, the twisted Joshua trees and the hot
orange sunsets.
because of the time and the approaching rain, followed small antelope trails instead of
the larger buffalo trails, and in this way kept to a more direct route
dust was everywhere—on leaves, branches, even on my teeth and lips
Narrow rocky defile
Beneath the jutting stone ledge, she sat hunched into a ball, knees tight against her
chest, her damp clothes about her.
Mountains

the cloud mist lifted, gradually came the dull patches of red glowing far beyond the
cliffs. Two active volcanoes
distant harsh mountains are composed of granite, covered with thorny shrubs and
acacia trees (Africa)
mountains, thrusting spires of naked rock into the heavens so high that you would
believe the very sky was pierced

Valleys

bounded on three sides by basalt outcrops and partially screened by brush


followed the ridge down toward a patch of grass
Olduvai appeared like a dark rift

Water

back to a rotting log that some long-forgotten flood had deposited crossways on the
spit
mouth of a thick sulfurous stream
watch the river (like a snake) to see the coiling of its muscular currents, catch the
shimmering of waves that caught the sunlight like scales
dry creek bed

Forests
the gallery forests of river red gum, various grasses, that lined the channels. Maybe a
low-lying area where runoff from high ground collected after rain. Sometimes dense
stands of mulga (acacia) woodland would grow there, where water was easiest to find
in a desert.
swallowed up by the jungle
thickly scented spruce branches clutched at his clothes, slapped against his chest and
shredded his hand
thick forest that carpeted the uplands
Along its length, cottonwoods had sprung up; young trees little more than twice a
man’s height. Thick grass had carpeted the narrow strip

Cities

Cracks like hardweed through a broken sidewalk


Gordian knot of one-way streets
he saw Russia. He saw its fields, steppes, villages and towns, all bleached white by the
moon and bright stars.

Terms:

Hills
Valleys
Ridge
Saddle
Cliff
Draw spur
Cut
Fill
Contour lines
Man-made objects

Mixture

Hawkes Pond gleamed through a very thin fringe of trees. It was a long narrow pond
and across it the land rose up in a wooded hill crowned with power lines.
Splashing through somewhat deeper water, meter-tall sedge beds, speed is very slow
and awkward.
Reeds and cattails, bunchgrasses, dense thicket, (present as small mounds 10-15 cm
tall
Grass covers mounds, depressions that you would tend to stumble in as you walk
Croc-infested rivers during rainy season would inhibit large mammal movement
Mts (rain shadow), rivers (flood), lakes (subterranean water)
African habitats (mosaic pattern): forests (groundcover is ferns), woodlands (ground
cover is grasses, no canopy)), bushlands (tree species grow as bushes with multiple
stems, more fruit) with thickets, shrublands (scrub or dwarf woodlands), grasslands,
wooded grasslands, deserts
Plants: euphorbia, cacti,
Grassland—-plateau, open country, velds, scrubland, deep washes, wadis, gully,
arroyo, wash, cut, creek
Grasses—poacea Hyparrhenia diplandra, forbs, coarse and grows in tufts, euphorbia
Savanna vegetation—corms, bulbs, tap roots, rhizomes
Found a very nice outcropping of rocks just over the crest, the kind of place snakes
love.

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