All features that contribute to the landscape's historic character should be recorded. These include the physical features described above (e.g. topography, circulation), and the visual and spatial relationships that are character defining. The identification of existing plants, should be specific, including genus, species, common name, age (if known) and size. The woody, and if appropriate, herbaceous plant material should be accurately located on the existing conditions map. To ensure full representation of successional herbaceous plants, care should be taken to document the landscape in different seasons, if possible.

Treating living plant materials as a curatorial collection has also been undertaken at some cultural landscapes. This process, either done manually or by computer, can track the condition and maintenance operations on individual plants. Some sites, suchas the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, in Brookline, Massachusetts have developed a field investigation numbering system to track all woody plants. Due to concern for the preservation of genetic diversity and the need to replace significant plant materials, a number of properties are beginning to propagate historically important rare plants that are no longer commercially available, unique, or possess significant historic associations. Such herbarium collections become a part of a site's natural history collection.

Once the research and the documentation of existing conditions have been completed, a foundation is in place to analyze the landscape's continuity and change, determine its significance, assess its integrity, and place it within the historic context of similar landscapes.

Reading the Landscape

A noted geographer, Lewis Pierce, stated, "The attempt to derive meaning from landscapes possesses overwhelming virtue. It keeps us constantly alert to the world around us, demanding that we pay attention not just to some of the things around us but to all of them--the whole visible world in all of its rich, glorious, messy, confusing, ugly, and beautiful complexity."

Landscapes can be read on many levels--landscape as nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place and aesthetic. When developing a strategy to document a cultural landscape, it is important to attempt to read the landscape in its context of place and time.

Reading the landscape, like engaging in archival research, requires a knowledge of the resource and subject area as well as a willingness to be skeptical. As with archival research, it may involve serendipitous discoveries. Evidence gained from reading the landscape may confirm or contradict other findings and may encourage the observer and the historian to re-visit both primary and secondary sources with a fresh outlook. Landscape investigation may also stimulate other forms of research and survey, such as oral histories or archeological investigations, to supplement what appeared on-site.