landscape and the eye

[marycatelli]

Sending the heroine through the landscape, lovely meadows and forest -- uninhabited -- and started to think about what she would notice.

A soldier would look for defensibility and points of attack  A hydrologist would look at water flow.  A botanist would analyze plants. . . .

A land-holding lady, especially since her lands are heavily agricultural, ought to look at whether this land could be settled, and wonder why not, at what monsters or magics it might hold to hinder that.  (In settled lands, she should be able to judge how productive they were, and whether they were farmed well.

Except that the heroine was not raised for her current status.  She was not educated to that eye.  Then, she knows it.  So should she be wondering whether it really is good farm land or whether, if she had been properly taught as the heir, she would see at a glance that something was wrong with it all.

All of which is only characterization since she is not dealing with that side of her post at all, at the moment. . . sigh

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Well, from a farming POV, if reasonably good land isn't covered with the right stuff at the right age, it makes you nervous about finding out why. As a normal person from the area, she's be used to what grows there before the fields get cleared, and what shows up in the fields when they've been left fallow for some time. Some climates, it better be covered with trees, or newly sprouted trees. Fire areas look peculiar for quite awhile. The black ash and charred bits on wood may disappear within five years, but you'd still see a gap in the age of trees there, either very young/very old, or a complete lack of old, depending how hot and severe it was.
Chemistry is a sneaky one. In some areas here on the West coast where you get plenty of rain, but all the rocks are serpentine and they leak enough toxic minerals that it sets up a peculiar soil chemistry that is only tolerated by a limited number of organisms, in the more severe areas it also dwarfs those tolerant trees and shrubs. There's a gradation to the effect that makes it clear where the effect is most severe. It looks weird and out of touch with more normal areas. An untrained person would probably notice the gradation as you pass through it.
Then there's water problems. Here locally, it's so dry you only get sparsely-spaced deep-rooted oaks and grass, it wouldn't get enough rain for conventional truckfarm crops, and it's pretty clear that you'd irrigate if you want to farm it. That sets up for salt damage eventually. Where irrigated land was abandoned, there's white and colored salt crystals on the tips of things, all over, and only a narrow list of indicator weeds will grow. Other places, you may see nice open ground with a texture that seems to be okay but it also shows a gradation effect in the weeds with successive rings, until what's growing there is usually seen by the edge of ponds, indicating an elevation/water table problem.

[marycatelli]

Well, water's not a problem -- she can tell that because everything growing wild is growing lushly.

Her disadvantage is that she arrived at the area in her mid-teens and did not frolick freely enough to be able to judge what is normal even in her own lands. She knows just enough to know that she should know things.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

That's a good instinct to have! It might prompt her to ask questions in an odd area, to get somebody to explain it to her, and the trick is to do it in such a way that it implies she's interested and engaged and concerned to hear the answers, without undermining her authority. "She doesn't know anything!" is a tricky one, unless she's asking questions all the time and it's just what she does. Watching some of the footage of the royals inspecting facilities or visiting specialty industries is interesting. People love to tell Charles or the Queen about something, and nobody seems to expect them to know their business ahead of time.

[marycatelli]

The thing being, the other side of its not being settled is that there is no one to ask. 0:)

She'll ask more later.