How to Describe a Landscape

This is the next in the “How to Write Descriptions” series.

Landscape descriptions are many and varied, so I’ll just touch on a few. 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

Oxbow lake
The river was a vigorous and optimistic blue
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.

Jacqui Murray  is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman , the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an  Amazon Vine Voice  book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics.  Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer.

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Filed under: descriptors, setting, writers resources Tagged: biomes, descriptions, landforms, landscape, setting, writing