Modern heritage practice has largely operated through visual continuity when it comes to historic gardens. We view them as stable time capsules that offer a reprieve from the chaos of the modern world, an experience that is often easy to understand and, above all, familiar.

In the context of accelerating climate change, this logic becomes unstable. As the world changes, so does our relation to certain notions. All sorts of antagonisms are constantly being reframed to help us process the state of affairs in the current moment; from geopolitics, to culture, to identity politics, to colonial aggression, and to the idea of Nature. Gardens are especially productive in this respect. And not just how we build now, but how ideas behind decades and centuries of landscape architecture have accumulated and are now under environmental pressure.

Ecological systems no longer support the conditions under which many heritage sites were conceived. The commitment to cosmetic continuity increasingly requires substitution, replacement, and technical adjustment to sustain the appearance of permanence.

In the neo-baroque parterre at the protected Arboretum Volčji Potok, Chamaecyparis lawsoniana hedges and cones began to die under prolonged summer heat. The response from the management was consistent with conservation practice: replace them with a more heat-resilient Thuja variant in order to maintain the formal structure. Formally, the intervention is discreet, but conceptually, it reveals an issue; the design is being adapted so that visual permanence is maintained through substitution. In other words, the image remains stable, but the ecological basis has shifted.

An alternative would not be to dramatise or aestheticize decay, but simply to resist correcting it—to refrain from replacement and allow the incompatibility between past and present to remain visible. The failure would become part of the site’s meaning rather than something concealed for the sake of appearances. In cities, we can replace dying trees indefinitely, but heritage sites—maintained to appear stable and timeless—offer a particularly potent perceptual platform where the effects of climate change can become visible.

At Rousham, preservationists oppose a large-scale development at Heyford Park, a former RAF airbase now proposed to accommodate housing, industry, and renewable energy infrastructure. The scale of transformation raises legitimate concerns regarding territorial pressure, infrastructure, and ecological impact.

Yet beyond the planning debate lies a deeper issue. Rousham is often described as “unspoilt,” but it stands beside a landscape long shaped by military runways, geopolitics, and contemporary settlement. The horizon appears pastoral, but what remains unseen are the systems that have sustained it—agricultural labour in the 18th century, military infrastructure in the 20th, and atmospheric and demographic pressures today.

The resistance to visible energy infrastructure, such as the three tall wind turbines that are a part of the plan, exposes a desire to preserve the image of a stable rural horizon—as if energy, housing demand, and climate were external to the site. This is not an endorsement of the development scheme, nor a dismissal of legitimate concerns about scale. The issue is different: how heritage imagines its horizon in relation to the systems already structuring it.

Weren’t the English landscape gardens conceived precisely as relational constructs? They framed the surrounding world rather than isolating themselves from it. The 18th-century picturesque harmonized working agricultural land shaped by labour, extraction, and estate management. Pastoral calm was always constructed. If the surrounding world now includes post-military reuse, renewable infrastructure, and housing, excluding these from view may preserve scenic coherence but sustain the fiction that heritage exists outside contemporary systems. There is no “away”; the world is already inside the garden.

The conflict exposes a larger question: is authenticity and historic autonomy located in the protection of a once-existing pastoral horizon, or in sustaining the garden’s structural openness to its contemporary environment?

If heritage is premised on continuity and stability, climate change introduces structural discontinuity and instability. The incompatibility between these temporalities cannot be indefinitely resolved through replacement and aesthetic maintenance. It is at this point that preservation becomes simulation.

In conferences, lectures and publications, we often make projections about our climate futures; how many places will end up underwater, which tree species will retreat, and how severe the storms will be. That world is already here. We no longer need to project scenarios in order to awaken or inform those we consider distracted; we must also reveal. The question is, how will landscape architecture intervene in aesthetic terms? By masking the cracks in the background, as so many failing projects have done before their demise? What is the social role of heritage in a climate crisis, and with that, the role of landscape architecture?

We need to let the image be disturbed—even completed by less pleasant confrontations—to remind us that the precious things we are trying to preserve are falling apart more fundamentally. We keep demanding from ecology to smile through landscape, and seldom consider that the necessary changes to our being-in-the-world will not necessarily come as “friendly ecology” but as an unsettling list of inconvenient restrictions and changes to our lifestyles. We speak easily of planting more trees, yet we rarely speak of consuming, replacing and making less. What we throw away returns as microplastics; the more we build, the heavier the carbon footprint. When these heritage sites were built, the sky was the limit. Today, we know how limited that sky is.