| Summary: | In landscape design legacy, diverse naturalistic landscape design types develop from a range of design approaches in application of the idea of nature. Naturalistic landscapes are important and valuable experiential landscapes. It is argued in the article, that naturalistic landscapes are not a single perceptual category and that the level of abstraction of natural condition affects not only preference for them, but also perceived naturalness. In addition, also other identifiable variables exist (namely Maintenance, Plant species diversity, Familiarity, Mystery, Coherence, Legibility, and Complexity), that to some extent account for these preferences and perceived naturalness. In the study, preference and perceived naturalness judgements were obtained for a selection of natural, naturalistic and geometrically designed landscape scenes. The results show, that naturalistic landscapes are more preferred than geometrical, and partly also more preferred than natural and that they consist of different visually perceived types. The most preferred are ‘Landscape style’ and ‘Wild garden’ scenes, less preferred are ‘Natural’ and ‘Biotope’ scenes, the least preferred are ‘Geometrical’ scenes. In addition, ‘Natural’ and ‘Biotope’ scenes are also perceived as the most natural. Preference is predicted mostly by Coherence, whereas perceived naturalness is predicted by several predictors, namely Preference, Maintenance, Familiarity, and Mystery. Hierarchy of score grouping for preference is as follows: form, content, structure, and spatial order. Slight difference is observed for perceived naturalness. In regard to perceived naturalness, the landscape scenes are grouped by content, form, structure and spatial order. Four distinctive groups of participants were clustered in regard to preference for landscape scenes, and three groups in regard to perceived naturalness.
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