Landscape policy has always been characterized, often supported but just as often hindered by its multiple origins in both landscape protection and landscape development. Along the recalcitrant and frequently inconsistent lines of preservation of monuments, nature conservation, land use, open-air recreation and the planting of new woods and shrubs respectively, landscape protection did not develop without difficulty. On a government level landscape protection was most extensively laid down in the Structure Plan for Nature Conservation and Protection of the Countryside. In this Plan the government introduced an extensive series of landscape categories, among which National Parks, National Landscapes, Valuable Agricultural Cultural Landscapes, Natural Heritage Valuable Areas, Large Landscape Unities and Valuable Scenic and/or Historical Views. In the Green Space Structure Plan from 1994 the differentiation of landscape policy was drastically reduced to the category of Valuable Cultural Landscapes and in addition a reference was made to the intended execution of large projects, such as the Randstad Green Structure and the National Ecological Network. In the revision of this Structural Plan in 2002 the category of National Landscapes was reintroduced. From the quarter of landscape development approximately every ten years a policy document is issued. The View on Landscape Creation (dating from the seventies), the View on Landscape (eighties) and the Policy Document on Landscape (nineties) are to be regarded as attempts at a synthesis of the various motives behind landscape development. The gist of these policy documents shifts from manifests for national green areas towards worked-out, integral concepts and formulas for rural-area development and closes with more and more complicatedly formulated recommendations, such as in the Development-oriented Landscape Strategy. After the Policy Document on Landscape with poorly argued maps of the so-called National Landscape Pattern, independent, development-oriented ...