The question: “What is a landscape?” is problematic. The difficulty associated with the question has its roots in the “normality” of the term “landscape”, because it is part of the colloquial speech. This situation is comparable with those we face when dealing with the words “environment” or “recreation” — everybody “knows” what the words mean but they have their own special definitions and opinions about the concepts. We find the same difficulty in the scientific community when they deal with landscape related research topics. If we consider “landscape ecology” which consists of several different disciplines, we find several different definitions for the term “landscape” in the literature. The definition often depends on the “working scale” of the sub-discipline or the particular focus. We therefore consider here the historical development of the term “landscape” in the context of European Landscape Ecology.