Throughout the country, special places commemorate significant events, activities, and people in our nation's history. These places are diverse and include parks and parkways, gardens, homes of famous people, battlefields, rural settlements, and early industrial centers. Every year, millions of people visit these places to learn more about our cultural heritage. Much of this learning experience is shaped by the landscape, which reflects an earlier time. These historic landscapes create lasting impressions. Yet, without ongoing maintenance, historic landscapes quickly lose their character and no longer educate future generations about their heritage.

Historic landscapes are composed of many features that contribute to their overall character and significance. Each feature is shaped by both the natural environment and a history of maintenance. The height of a hedge, the flowers within a perennial garden, the condition of a fence, the repair of a stone wall, and the width and surface of a carriage road, are all examples of details in the landscape that are influenced by maintenance practices.

The maintenance staff responsible for the long-term care of a historic landscape are faced with many challenges. Some landscape features, in particular vegetation, change dramatically over time, while other features, such as walls and paths, may gradually erode or disappear. The maintenance staff must address issues of decline, wear, decay and damage in order to perpetuate the character of the place.

This document offers a framework for a maintenance operations plan that focuses on preserving the character of a historic landscape. Throughout the document, the term preservation maintenance describes the practice of monitoring change, controlling growth, replacing in-kind, and minimizing disturbance in the landscape to ensure that features, such as vegetation, paths, walls, and other landscape furnishings, are not lost and the character of a place is not compromised. The guiding philosophy is that all existing landscape features should be preserved until the history of the landscape is fully researched and documented.